After Blue
by Lena Crown
The grass just long enough to bow at the tips. Fallen apricots. Or no, apricot-ish fruits the size of ping-pong balls, velvet skin tie-dyed tricolor sherbet like mangoes. A hundred mango-hued non-apricots polka-dotting the trees’ neat brown skirts of wood chips. The early-evening sun on their rumps in pale peach-fuzz crescent moons. Matted patches between where I lean on my hands, where sneakers have smeared the pulp into the grass.
We need a spot with a vista, we intoned, walking along the edge of campus, casting about for a good spot to unfurl the bedsheet. Proclaiming once, twice: I just don’t know if this is quite the right vista, giggling as we ambled past the lawn flanking the freshman dorms, the creek behind the Chipotle.
A light breeze that smells of pickles. Between us, an open bag of novelty pickle-dust popcorn that you promised me I would like (you were right). Clouds, where earlier today there were none. The uneasy comfort of the hours drowsing between us and the certain storm. A jaunty pickle jigging across the front of the bag in Victorian loafers. Three goose feathers abandoned in the grass, stiff and dramatic, as though flung down in writerly defeat (or elation).
Upon finding the lake, the apricottish-studded shade: now, this—this is a vista. Watching from under a palm as a fleet of geese promenades. The quiet glee in your face as you read to me from your stout biography of James Wright, the poet you love most, who as a young child often climbed to the highest point above the river, anxious to feel—you glance at me, eyes wide—the sense of vista he found in books. In disbelief, tipping our heads back, laughing.
I feel lightly insane, delirious, like that one poem I read in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel—the one that sang, the red one (the rest blue, though every poem in that book is made of blood) as though she’d eked it out at the peak of one long inhale. Love, the world / suddenly turns, turns colour. One tiny perfect confetti cannon of a poem amid a pile of ash. You look at me with amusement and tell me I unwither like a plant in the sun (how can you tell? I can tell because you never shut up about it), which might be true—that expanding is what I always do—but so what? After so much blue (the mold in my bathroom eating up the oxygen while we roam the same rank corridors day after day like veins) right now I think I may be enormous, / I am so stupidly happy.
It’s possible that this is just what happens to people when life becomes a bruise, like one long wound bleeding into recovery so slowly that you tell time by color. For an hour, no more grey birds, no ash of eye. A flash of senseless red joy; the soft thwop of almost-apricot meeting woodchip. I close my eyes and meet red there. In my mind, I climb to the highest point above the river. I breathe in.
Lena Crown is a writer from Oakland, California. Her work is published or forthcoming in Sonora Review, The Offing, Entropy, Hobart, Atticus Review, and Pidgeonholes, among others. She is currently stationed outside Washington, D.C., pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University.
