Big Arms Big issues

Blue.

The color of your eyes. I don’t know the first time I noticed just how blue they were. Maybe it was on our first camping trip together that summer of 2022. We went to Bear Head Lake Campsite. We missed the trail for our campsite and hiked around the lake twice. We ran from mosquitos, but never fast enough; we laughed when we got home, running our fingers over our arms and legs, which felt like those sheets of candy dots we used to eat as children. We ordered pizza and fell into bed exhausted; you said it was the best day.

It went so well we decided to make it a tradition; we only got to go twice. You died two weeks before our third visit, and now I’ll never book us a weekend there again; I don’t know if I’ll ever go there again. I remember that trip so well. Everything functioning perfectly. We set up our tent, hung up our hammocks, and worked rhythmically to make camp, prepare food, and roll out our sleeping mats. I realized what a good team we made out there, buried in the beauty of the Northwoods, the air so crisp and fresh, alive with the scent of newness, the knowledge that something beautiful was unfurling between us, something so very right. Camping is an arduous risk to take as a couple, but like all things life sent us, we passed the test.

We lay in our hammocks reading; I kept peeking above my book to steal glances at you. I couldn’t stop; you were a magnet calling me home. You caught me once and laughed, saying, “We’re so obsessed with each other right now.” We were, I never stopped. I am still obsessed with you even now.

I was in awe at the rightness of it all. Astounded that I had somehow found a man who matched my thirst for adventure, travel, fun, the great outdoors, and grasping onto all this world has to offer. That I had found someone just as fluent in nature as I, and that we could work together so well. I started to fall in love with you that weekend. You knew it, I knew it, neither of us would say it. But how could I not? You, in your little Wildflyer beanie, your boots, your cozy zip-up that I always stole. The one you’d wrap around me when my hands felt cold to your touch. You, with your sparkly, beautiful blue eyes.

I have a snapshot of you lying in our tent, reading your book; I was laughing at you because you had to run your finger under every line to stay focused. I called you old. You looked up at me, and I shot a picture. Blue. The bluest eyes stared back. I didn’t know then that those eyes would close forever just two years later, that all I would be left with was this memory of the color blue. 

Blue, the bluest blue sky the day you died. How can that be? How can something so terrible happen on such a beautiful day?  It isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense. How could the sky hang above us with such promise, such fullness, even as the future slammed shut in front of me? Locked behind the same door I couldn’t open to get to you. We lay under that sky all day, sharing our hopes and our dreams, talking about marriage and life afterward. The blue sky held it all until it held nothing at all. 

That same sky is blue as I write this. A bird chirps to my left. The sun has risen, and it is yet another day. The world keeps turning without you; the days keep coming, and I keep waking up, though I don’t want to. I hate this sky; I hate that a new 24 hours separate me from the last moments I spent with you. The pages of the calendar are stretching between us. It is now August, and I left you in July. Soon, it will be September, and suddenly, it will be January 2025. I don’t want to step into a new year without you. But the blue sky stretches before me.

It should have been black, it should have been raining, it should have been torrential downpours in a hurricane. Instead, it was….blue. Clear blue, the sun shining, a perfect summer day. Why can’t the weather match our pain? 

Blue is the color of your daughter’s eyes. The daughter who became like mine, but with your death, she follows. That is the risk of loving someone else’s child. You two, with the blue eyes. Mine were hazel; they marked me as an outsider. I always wondered if we’d had the boy we wanted, would his eyes favor mine or yours? I secretly hoped yours; they were so much more beautiful than mine; you were so much more beautiful than me. Blue is the color of our family. The family we blended, the family we hoped to have, the family that is now a figment of my imagination. Sometimes, my arms ache as if they knew a baby was supposed to be in them. I never even knew I wanted one until you. 

Blue, like the ocean waters we scuba dove in just a few months ago. We held hands 40 meters under the surface, and as our bodies joined in the dance of the coral, we felt so alive, so part of something bigger than ourselves, so sure that a God existed; the proof was in the masterpiece hidden on the ocean floor. The sun glittered from above, and the blue expanse stretched before us. We had plans, so many plans, so many places to see, so many waters to dive into, and so many things to discover.  Our dreams were the color blue. 

Blue, like the color of the dot I pray will appear next to your name and photo in my text messages. I stare at that little rectangle, opening and closing it, as if one of these times, the answer will be different, I’ll get a ping, and a new text will be waiting from “Jason MoveFwd”! You’ll say you love me, this was all a nightmare, a bad joke, you’re coming home, you’ll see me soon. If I had known the one you sent me at 3:05 that day was the last one I’d ever get, I never would have opened it. I would give myself something to look forward to, something to keep you alive. As if by somehow preserving your last words, I could immortalize you forever. But they weren’t even words; your final text was a picture of our future child, an AI-generated image we thought would turn into a real, tiny little human with ten fingers and, ten toes and your blue eyes. Now, it just mocks me, one more shattered dream in a long list of tiny deaths to grieve. I still text you sometimes, but it says you have silenced your notifications, and my words were delivered quietly. Sometimes I hit “notify anyway” as if by sending my message bigger and louder, you’ll somehow hear it wherever you are, and I’ll somehow get the response back I so desperately crave.

When I think of your eyes, I think of all of these things: the woods, the ocean, the plans, the dreams, the family, the children, the laughter, the sorrow, the hope, the love. It swirls together into the perfect hue of blue, and I am lost in it, but your eyes slam shut, and it is gone.

If grief had a color, mine would be blue. I hate the color blue.