Red Sky: Chapter 41
As I sat in the cafeteria on my last night, I realized nothing had changed in my two and a half years.
We still ate the same paste from the same dispensers with the same water in the same glasses. The trays continued to have the thin sheet of paper even after the discovery of Com’s manuscripts and my sketches, a triumph of bureaucratic inefficiency. Those sheets allowed us to write down our thoughts, to communicate with each other, to dream, but they still kept putting the paper on the trays so they wouldn’t have to wash them at night. We still went to the mine at the same time in the morning and returned at the same time at the end of the day. The days go by fast in prison, some inmates leave, new guards arrive, yet nothing ever seems to change.
I didn’t picture her at the table in the morning anymore. Like Ray’s dreams of running free in the grass, my dreams of waking to find Aya at the breakfast table disappeared with the years in the mine. Now I dreamed of the beginning. Before the beginning. Before we went on that speedliner trip together. Before we had ever spent a night together.
Aya stood in line at the counter of the café waiting for the clerk. He was taking longer than usual. I was already seated. It was a break between classes. She wore a yellow pullover with a hood on the back and a green shirt underneath. A gold necklace in the shape of a heart pressed against her skin.
“You’re late,” I said when she sat down.
“Very funny.”
Aya took a packet of synthetic sugar from the dispenser and stirred it into her tea, then looked at to me. “Notice anything different.”
“You straightened your hair.” I wanted to tell her she looked beautiful, but that would have been too forward at this point in our relationship. Besides, I had a confession to make. A few moments passed.
“I kinda miss the curls,” I admitted sheepishly.
Aya’s face widened, maybe a little upset with my honesty. “Don’t worry, they’ll be back in a few days.”
She inspected a strand of her hair. “My hair never stays straight. Isn’t it odd how those with straight hair always want curls and those with curls always want straight hair.”
“We always want what we can’t have,” I said not very profoundly, searching to make eye contact as she took a sip of her tea.
“I don’t always want what I can’t have. I’d be constantly miserable if I lived my life like that.”
“Well, some us can’t control what we want.” I teased.
“Sure, you can," Aya responded seriously. "My grandmother has a saying, she says if we aim for the stars, we get the sky; but if we aim for the sky, we get the stars.”
“What does that mean?” I continued to tease.
“It means that….” Aya stopped, tilting her head to the right. “I don’t know, but it sounds good.”
We both laughed. As Aya laughed her head tilted even more to the right and sunlight erupted over her left shoulder.
I wasn’t blinded at first. I watched as Aya bloomed, her hair turning into the reddest of roses, petals swirling, covering her ears, dropping down her cheeks.
Overcome by the brilliance, I put a hand up to shield my eyes. It was too late as the world continued to transform, turning colorless. The roses now a shade of black, her skin shaded lighter, the table we were sitting at, the strangers engaged in conversation behind her, everything and everyone plummeting into grays.
“What’s wrong?” Aya noticed my hand over my eyes.
“You blinded me.”
She rolled her eyes. I could see that even as I adjusted to the colorless world.
I stared into her no longer brown eyes trying to find the slightest hint of color. It was a pleasingly long look. Aya deflected my gaze with a smile. I blinked.
With a rush of blood all of the colors came back at once. A symphony of iridescence. The brown of her eyes, the green of her shirt, the gold of her necklace. The world vibrated and hummed then settled into its normal routine.
“Are you okay?’ She asked.
“Yes,” I said.
But I wasn’t okay because I knew she was going to leave soon. The hour between our classes had turned into thirty minutes. I was counting, keeping track of time in my head trying to make our time together slow down. I wanted to be with her, not just at lunch between classes, at night and in the morning, when the sun turned the sky red in the evening, and most of all when the world was black and there was no sun at all.
She wanted to be with me, too. I could feel it, the heat coming off her body, just as the heat came off mine when we were together. After that lunch ended, when she went off to her class and I went off to mine, I started to shiver as that heat went away. I put on my jacket to keep warm.
Looking down at the blue paste sulking in my bowl, I thought of those early times. We look back at the earliest moments of a relationship with fondness because they are still full of possibilities. We can pretend those earliest moments aren’t in the past because there is a future to them, even if that future is part of the past as well.
Why did I love Aya and no one else? Was it physical attraction? Emotional attachment? Did it come from my heart or my brain? My soul or my lust?
I cannot answer any of these questions. There were no reasons for my love. I felt. That is all. I have been given the capacity to feel but the inability to understand why. To surrender oneself without such understanding is faith. Maybe it was my lack of faith that caused me to lose her the first time. I wasn’t going to lose her again.
When I gave up on her at the pier I had done the right thing only to be repaid with the cruel blow of prison for both of us. The secret tunnel gave me a slim chance to rectify that. A very slim chance. But it was worth dying to try.