The days have been gray for too long.
The burnt-out, faint glow of the rounded screen emanates the fog. The voices from the suspiciously benevolent reporter can’t cut through the fog, dissipating into the dewdrops it drowns in.
My eyes have dark circles under them, accentuated by the lazily painted landscape—the black and white landscape. The skies aren’t thrilling enough to be thunderous, but red strikes of lightning rip through the whites of my eyeballs as I gaze at the screen. I’m tired, but not the type of tired that sleep can fix. The type of tiredness that sticks with me when I sit up in the morning, go through the school day, and lay back in bed while it hangs around me like a forecast. The radar is an ankle weight.
Even the spitting of the rain isn’t enough to provoke a reaction from my expressionless expression. The cold flicks spatter across my face, the windshield, and the back of my head when I turn away from the gaseous rugburn that scuffs across my cheeks. I squint into the grainy horizon, but my face doesn’t contort enough to convey any sort of meaning beyond mild discomfort.
And while my eyes can open fully in the sigh of a skyline, I am dissatisfied. Empty. Incomplete. Constant neutrals and nips of cold eat away at my skin and my heart. It hurts worse than sunburn ever will. It hurts worse than cut-up feet from running through woodchips barefoot after swimming. It hurts worse than giving myself road rash after falling off of my skateboard in front of my elderly neighbor twice in one day.
The brief spurts of sunlight in February and March this year have pulled me to the surface as I drowned. It grips me by the collar with its rays and forcefully drags me up to the surface as bubbles of shock escape from my mouth. I’m not complaining—the rays become a washer as they wrap around me, giving me enough buoyancy to float to the surface.
The sun hugs me a little too eagerly, covering my eyes with its hands from behind me with a “guess who?” as I laugh and try to escape from the overstimulating clutches. I don’t put up much of a fight, though. I instead take it by the hand and twirl it around, letting the radiation fly through the pollinated air. I can finally take a full breath without my nostrils clogging or my throat forcing out frozen coughs.
Maybe nothing was as bad as it had seemed when the tea-stained skies stayed stagnant. Maybe the azure in the heavens above was all that I needed in order to feel again—to tear away the rotten, black outer of my heart and let the color flow from my chest, pumping hues and shades in and out of circulation as it gives and takes from the world around me.
Maybe all I needed was to sit on a beach towel in my best friend’s backyard on a day for popsicles and starting first grade, my fingers resting on top of the sun’s as we lean back on our hands and raise our faces to the harmonious abstract above.
