Now that you know who you are What do you want to be?

, bThis is the third part of the Bay and Tulya story. It's coming out well, don't you think? You can read the previous two parts here and here.

Finally a nurse came and led the pair to Abi's room. she smiled at them, but there was no comfort in her eyes. The walls of her room were beige, and the lone window looked out at a gray office building across from the hospital. Tulya reached forward but didn't touch Abi. She just looked at her hands and ran them through her hair, then placed them together and began to slide them back and forth nervously. She whispered to the doctor “So? How is she?” She looked angry but it was like an angry with the red replaced with blue. The doctor, a thin, debonair sort of man with clear gray-blue eyes, looked at her, and then at Bay. “She's your grandmother?” he asked. “You're not answering my question,” she said, almost menacingly. The doctor smiled at her knowingly. “Well, then I will assume you are her grandchild,” he mused aloud. “Please. Just tell me. Will she be ok?” Tulya pleaded now, she looked at Bay, and he would not look back. She looked at Abi, who seemed not to be registering anyone or anything, and she looked the doctor again, who sighed. “Dove--” he began, and then started a little from the fierce glare he had evinced from Tulya. He looked at her straight, then, and his eyes were wide enough that Tulya could see the frieze of his irises. They looked like little snowflakes, circling around his pupil. “Pneumonia,” he said. “The scientific term is lobar pneumonia—caused by the bacteria Streptococcus Pneumoniae.” Tulya tried to swallow, but found that there was no saliva left in her mouth to allow her to do so. She had studied this particular bacterium in science class last semester. It affected the elderly much more so than other ages, and could lead to complications, death, even. But no, thought Tulya. That was rare. It happened mostly in developing countries, not America. Abi was a strong woman, she would recover just fine. “We're going to put her on Amoxicillin, alright, honey?” The doctor's voice cut short her thoughts. “I'm sure she'll recover just fine under our care. For now,” --he looked down at his clipboard to check her name-- “Mrs. Simmons needs to rest and let us care for her. You may visit her tomorrow morning.” The doctor picked up his stethoscope and tightened the hold on his clipboard, then spun around and left. Tulya looked to Bay. “Take me home.” she whispered. 

But when the pair arrived home, Tulya could find no comfort in the bright rooms. “It smells like her too much here,” she moaned. Bay took her off in the car, and they drove down to Venice Beach. The sunlight was turning purple, and while the world was slowly dimming and cooling for the night, the rocky sand was still warm from the rays of the day. Tulya slid off her converses and sat on the beach. Bay followed, and watched as she buried her feet into two little mounds on the shore. Slowly, she lay down and Bay began to cover her, heaping warm mother earth sand on her body, until only her head stuck out, and her black curls were tan with sand. Tulya closed her eyes and was soon asleep. Bay lay beside her and found that his dreams were fast to come as well. He had swift, vicious dreams, of monkeys falling from their trees, of hollow painted statues, of Tulya, dancing the tarantella, spinning faster and faster until he could no longer bear it, and he opened his eyes. Looking up, he found no moon, but there were many stars in the sky, and they lit up the night with promises of very far away. He saw that Tulya was softly breathing beside him, still covered in cool sand, that had little fissures and cracks from where she had stirred in her sleep. He got up quietly and went to the car. Lying there were the blankets they had wrapped Abi in, forgotten on the back seat. He took them and brought them back to the shore. Gently, Bay brushed the sand from Tulya and placed the blankets around her. Then, he lay beside her  and slid beneath the blankets as well, and buried his nose in her neck. Tulya murmured, but did not wake.  Bay dreamed again, this time of boats sailing over the horizon line, and of colorful balloons dotting the skies, and of he and Tulya waltzing in the school gym. 

He woke at morning, while the dawn was still gray and the air was soft and dewy and salty. Bay let Tulya sleep and washed his feet in the ocean. Then, he picked up two hotdogs from the man on the boardwalk who was just setting up. They had neglected to eat dinner, yet Bay found that he was not hungry. He returned to find Tulya sitting up and twirling her hair, staring at the waves as they rolled in and out, splashing lace foam along the wet sand. She accepted the hotdog, and they ate together. When she was finished, Tulya turned to Bay. “I want to go back to see her,” she said. “Let's just stop at home first.” Bay nodded and she lifted her feet up from the sand, brushing at her toes, and stepped lightly to the car, collecting her discarded shoes along the way. They got in the car and drove back down the side roads.  

Title Quote: Baby You're a Rich Man, The Beatles

Carry that weight a long time.

Full as the Forest

Veins 

curve opaquely

raindrops fall

fall down

down 

tiptoeing brokenly

upon carved dark passageways.

My heart is as

full as the forest and as 

smooth as the sea.

But the 

azure vessels

coursing by

this scarlet muscle

never fully penetrate

the swirling oblivion

of the mind. 

And my soul 

my very spirit is as

full as the forest and as

smooth as the sea. 

As smooth as the 

rushing, chopping

churning daybreak moonlight

sea!

I rage

whoosh

glimmer

roll and slow to 

a trickle

trickle down

down

warming small

troubled rounded

pearl toes.

Title Quote: The Beatles, Carry That Weight

When you find yourself in the thick of it

Haiku (untitled)

nestled in the snow
a tiny jeweled footprint
among busy boots.

Title Quote: The Beatles, Martha My Dear

But listen to the color of your dreams It is not living It is not living

Sometimes she saw green. She would just wake up and everything would look as if viewed through emerald glasses. The pearls in her grandmothers folded wrinkly ears, the sky through her old french glass windowpane, it was all tinted with green.


And then the next day, she would see it all in red. Red trees, red teeth, red cars.


Then blue. Or purple. And so on. She loved it. Loved never knowing what she would see when she woke up, loved how everything that looked one way one day looked completely different the next.


But she could never see what she had seen again, because if she ever took a picture, it was of the colors that everyone else saw, normal people, not the color she saw it in, so the next day she would see the image in another color. She could never preserve these moments of beauty affected so profoundly by the colors.  It was like there was a screen, a translucent tinted slide, that conformed perfectly to her irises, to her unique pupils. And each tinted slide was replaced as she closed her eyes to sleep, to wake up and see a bright new day, a bright new color.


She missed so many of those days, missed with such a longing, like the day she saw in mango orange, rays of sunlight of creamy sorbet, or the day everything was different shades of night blue. It was like night vision, everyone leaping shadow dancers. But even without the chance to ever revisit these days but in her memories, the girl lived with it. She knew she was lucky enough to even experience them once. 


She was a painter, and everyone would marvel at her work because she would paint the most mundane, everyday things, and transform them into, well, art. The girl felt this was the closest she would ever get to having the world through her eyes, so she worked hard. She worked with a passion, the thinnest point of a pencil carving the most precision and life onto a canvas she would be glimpsing in sepia tea color, then salmon pink. What people liked so much about her works as that she might paint one scene ten times, yet each piece was so uniquely different, you could hardly tell they were all the exact same view, the exact same snippet of a life. That was because each one was painted in shades of just one color, just as the girl saw it.


She, of course, couldn't tell the colors she painted apart from the other. They were all just different hues of the same color. So instead, she would have an assistant (mostly it was her high school teacher who would help out) and she would say to him or her when she began painting "Today is turquoise. Bring me some turquoise." And he or she would bring her a palette with turquoise paint, which she would mix to different shades for for the "different" colors of the painting, judging by their shadows, their lightness and darkness. 


People loved her technique and unique style and how much feeling was put into each piece, and the girl loved how happy the paintings made people. And so it went on like this, a painting a day, never the same color. 


Until one day. The two colors she never saw in where black or white, the absence and totality of color. But this day, she woke up and everything was in black-and-white, an old photograph. Amazed, the girl looked in the mirror, devoid of color for the first time in her life. Shades of gray, it was all shades of gray, dusty, creamy, sharp, softened. She ran around the house and outside in a frenzy, looking at everything in stunned rapture.


Then, She took out her tubes of paint, to see them colorless as well. But when she took off the tops, thick, saturated, explosive color slipped out. The tube marked yellow was the creamiest yellow; the tube marked red was the most violent red. The vibrance of each color shocked the girl. She reeled back, experiencing the fact that she could see all the colors--at the same time! Overjoyed, she ran to the mirror, chose the colors she thought herself to be, and painted herself colorful over her black-and-white reflection. She leapt off, leaving the portrait of a colorful young woman painted to the mirror, smiling the widest smile possible.


She ran outside and noticed her feet, nestled in the grass of her front yard. She plucked one piece, felt its soft slenderness. She weighed it in her palm; weren't books always mentioning how green the grass was? The girl uncapped the green, vert and squeezed some of it on her palm. Laughing, she pressed it against the grass. Grabbing a handful of speckled green grass, she gathered it into a brush and painted the grass around her the most lush, verdant green she had ever seen in. Then she painted the waiting school bus a daffodil yellow. Then instead of getting on the school bus, she blissfully lay on the ground, surrounded by a black-and-white world. She reached up and brushed the sky blue, and dreamily began to paint upon it a rainbow, using every color she had ever seen in.




Title Quote: The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows