Brennan Doran
403 Cotton St.
Chapel Hill, NC
Looking Up
Some time ago I found myself counting the black scars of discarded, trampled chewing gum that littered the sidewalks downtown. I reached eighty-four before coming to a dead end at a large fountain. Children ran and slipped and cried and laughed around the edges, while mothers fretted and smiled and chased them round and round. I turned my back and walked away. I looked down at the ground until I was home; all the while trying to remember the way your face would have lit up at the fountain. Your face, your big green eyes, and your hair that never quite stayed the way it should have. Your smile, with the little gap in your front teeth. All of it becoming hazy. Was it slipping away, or just spreading out in my mind and evaporating like the water sprayed around the fountain?
I looked down whenever I walked, half in sadness and half in hopes that I would not entwine my last images of you with the people who move around me in this snow globe of a planet. You, breaking through the glass-worked dome—me still inside, with snow falling as splotches of black gum to coat the sidewalks. Beleaguered in my grief, I walked with tremulous steps through the marchof each new day.
Sleep never found me that night, as I brooded over my inability to move on, and wondered if forgetting was the only way to happiness. But when that first sliver of weak, pale light came creeping through my blinds, it felt like an invitation. I walked to the window and watched as the morning light shimmered in its new beginning, a luxury belonging to days and seasons, but not to men. Not in this world, anyway.
It was Saturday, and after watching the sun rise and banish its nemesis, night, I determined to spend the day looking up instead of down.
At noon the sun hung right between us, the pendulum star caught in mid-swing. All around the clouds disappeared, and I could touch the sky and see it ripple to the end of the world.It was a serene and welcoming blue that you can get lost in if you look up for just a moment. I was in the clearing out back, lying on that green blanket you liked so much. The one we kept in the hall closet downstairs, that I would go get it for you when you were on the couch and your feet were cold. As I spread it out on the grass I noticed still had a multitude of little spiny yellow hairs clinging to it, even though I had to put Roxy down last December. She used to stare out the front window every afternoon in those last few months, and I knew she was waiting for you to come walking to the door, and to come inside and scratch behind her ears. She missed you, like I do. She used to curl up in the green blanket sometimes, turning round and round, again and again, before finally forcing herself to fight through the pain of those two bad hips and lay down on the warm little fleece that must have still smelled like you. I put it back in the hall closet after Roxy died, so now it just smells dusty and stale.
I was picking the little yellow hairs off of the green blanket and smiled for the first time in a long time. I lied down on my back to drink in the day, and up above I saw a pure white jet trail against the sky.When I cupped my hands around my eyes I saw a boat sailing on a deep blue sea far below me, its wake trailing behind in twin gossamer strands. I was on a cliff overlooking the beach, watching you. You loved the ocean, always wading into the water until it got too deep to stand. You would float in the waves for a while, and then trudge back through the waves to meet Roxy with the tide nipping at your ankles, calling you back.Roxy ran in tight circles, covered in sand. I never understood how such fleeting moments could take hold so deeply in my memory. Looking back down,I placed each dog hair on the tip of my finger and blew them, one by one, into the summer breeze.I imagined little parts of Roxy travelling all over the country, and maybe even getting picked up by some jet stream to fly across the world. Maybe one of them will even make its way to you.
There are so many things I still want to say to you. So many questions I would ask. Did you ever walk through an open field toward a sunset? It feels like the whole world is gone, swallowed by this magnificent wave of color. It feels like you’re the only one left, but you don’t even mind, because it’s so beautiful. And calm. And it always fades and is over before you know it. I think that’s how it is when we die. I saw a sunset like that today, and I thought of you. As I gazed at the glow of the sky I knew that if there is a heaven, this must be the golden backdrop of its infinite play. And I knew you must have sent me those skies, those colors,and every musical horizon that I missed in all those days I spent looking down.It must be true, because that sunset was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since you went away. But, like everything else, it faded into memory, and I miss it.
I draped the green blanket over your favorite kitchen chair, and there it remains. I can’t bring myself to put it back in the closet, or to wash it. I need the little yellow hairs that cling desperately to the green fuzz, and the fragrant smell of fresh cut summer grass that lingers in its folds, to remind me of that day in the clearing when I reached to the sky and felt your touch.
But as the days have passed, I’ve realized that the sky isn’t just above—it’s all around me. I might not see the brilliant blue of the atmosphere below the line of the horizon, but all the air is shared in all that beauteous space from the soles of my feet to the edge of space. And in that air I find you, mixing the paint of every sunset’s colorful brushstroke,chasing after Roxy’s hairs as they fly away, and floating in the blue ripples high above. As the days march on I still look down sometimes, and sometimes still look up. But after the day I found you again, I mostly look forward, your memory kept safe in the air around me.