It hurts to breathe, like I’m taking in winter air. I press the heels of my palms against my eyes, but I want to cry so loudly the whole world stops and listens. I lost my mother. She will never hug me again. How can I see the colors without her?
“You don’t have to hold back,” Jamie says quietly.
I can’t even answer him without sobbing. Instead, I wrap my arms around my knees, hiding my face, and let the tears find their path onmy cheeks. My shoulders tremble, my breaths are choppy, and I know I’m making a scene, but I also know Jamie hasn’t left. If anything, he inches closer while still keeping a respectful amount of space between us. Just enough for people to know there’s a friend beside me.
When there are no more tears to cry, I wipe my eyes with the back of my arm. When I look up, Jamie is dangling a wrinkled tissue in front of me.
“It’s clean; I promise,” he says.
I accept it from him, dabbing my eyes and carefully blowing my nose. “I keep crying with you.”
“Well.” Guilt lines his expression. “I’m so sorry I asked that question.”
I snort, looking away. My eyes feel tight, stretched too thin.
“No, I’m serious,” he says. “I said I wasn’t going to ask you something that would hurt you. And I just did.”
I shake my head. “It’s not a bad question. We all deal with grief, don’t we?”
He smiles sadly. “I don’t think it’s wrong that a day will come when you don’t feel this grief. But I don’t think you’ll ever forget the pain. You’ll just have more joy in your life.”
I hope he’s right. “Why are you asking, though?”
He lets out a low whistle. “You can say I’m curious about the world? This life can’t just be it. There has to be something else. A way to deal with an inevitable pain like losing someone. Or even to deal with the everyday grief of being let down or wondering why your life is a certain way.” He goes quiet as if reassessing what he wants to say. “I’m interested in religions. I know for some it’s personal, but I feel when we have questions like this, it helps to know if others feel the same way, you know?”
I nod.
“I think about what’s happening in the world,” he continues, not meeting my eyes. “Innocents dying and people never finding justice,and I wonder if this is it. How could their lives be just that minuscule moment of pain. It’s all they knew.” He messes up his hair, smiling uneasily. “Forget it. I’m being weird.”
It’s strange seeing the colors in pieces like this. Like I’m trying to fill in a page, but I just can’t seem to do it. Slashes of color seeping through the endless gray.
He tilts his head, resting his chin on the arm stretched over the bench “Tell me about you. What do you like?”
My eyebrows lift, a smile tickling my lips. “You are… you’re something else.”
He grins. “Good something else?”
“I don’t know.” I try finding the words, but the sun is too bright and there are too many people around us. There are words I’d find if we were in a space and time suspended outside of reality. But sitting in this park, it feels like I’d be saying it to the whole world.
“But we’re friends, right?” he asks.
I think about that word. I give it such reverence in my heart, but I’ve known it only in rare moments. The night when Alexis and I were ten and her mom let her sleep over at my apartment. The summer day when her mom showed us how to bake cookies, and I got a sugar rush. The maroon paintbrush Alexis bought for my fifteenth birthday that I found delivered in our mailbox. Talking for hours on the phone when we started junior high in separate schools.
This is different. But I like it.
“Yeah.” Orange flares from the red in his soul. The color of kindness for me. “I’d like to be your friend.”
“As my friend, you should know I hate mushrooms,” he says solemnly.
“Oh, then I take back what I said.”
“There you go with your jokes.”
“No, I’m being serious.”
He laughs and glances at the mural on the ground, smiling. “This drawing reminds me of your mother.”
A zap of electricity sizzles through me. “What?”
