Providence, Fate, and Blue

A retelling that is almost kind of not at all true, but holds truth, all the same, in its own strange way.

I fell asleep as soon as I got in the car. I pulled my mother’s baseball cap down over my eyes, buried my peripheral in hair, dropped my feet on the dashboard and proceeded to ignore the world. My mother was driving, controlling the careful phases of breaking and accelerating so precisely that I wasn’t sufficiently jostled. She was quiet, not bothering to attempt conversation with a daughter who was dead to the world.

I didn’t wake up until we hit traffic, and, even then, I tried to keep my eyes closed after attempting to view the world and temporarily blinding myself. I read off the directions with a hand on the brim of the baseball cap, shoving it down still further to eliminate glare. When we arrived in Providence and I climbed out of the car, I could conjecture that it was sunny, but I hadn’t seen the sky.

I walked three blocks to the admissions office without bringing my eyes above knee-level. The light was too harsh, my head too sensitive; I saw no need to risk painful sunspots dancing before my eyes. The information session was held in a poorly lit room with the windows behind me. The sky, whatever color it was, could not be perceived.

I finally looked up later, as we left the building, when I tripped spectacularly on the stairs and managed, somehow, land on my back, my head back, my face tilting up, my eyes open. I saw the sky. I saw the blue. I saw the blue so bright I can barely stand to see it, so blue that red and green and yellow and black and brown and orange do not exist, so blue that the entire universe stretches up above in a sky so deep that the sun seems close.

I saw the blue, and I was in a car, in the back seat, a car winding slowly around and around a mountain, and, with each revolution to the side away from the other hills, I saw the sky, the blue, the blinding blue, stretching out over and above and around the endless plains that somehow managed to exist in mountainous Utah. I saw the blue, the bright blue, and I was standing over the Grand Canyon, looking at the sky made somehow bluer by the red rock, bluer by the vastness.

I saw the blue, and I was in a gondola by myself, suspended over ski slopes that once held snow and would hold snow again but now held flowers and grasses and stones. I propped my feet up across from me, pushed my hair back from my face, tilted up my eyes and proceeded to view the world, to almost touch the mountains, to see the sky. The gondola stopped mid-journey, and a breeze came through the window and the gondola rocked and I began to sing a song of my own, a song for then without words, but soon with a story, of flying and running and living, but mostly of flying. I sang the song to the sky, sang it to the bright blinding blue that was deeper than night and stretched farther than the sun and would hold me, and cradle me, and keep me warm with its beautiful everywhere blue.

My eyes closed and opened, and my mother reached me, helped me up, and the blue was suddenly gone, replaced by tired bricks and weary ivy, but I could still see it, and I could feel the mountains and the canyon and the plain, and suddenly, in Providence, there was a planet.