A Life in Colour

I leaned into the breeze filtering through the cracked window, trying to enjoy what I felt was going to be the last moment of simplicity for a very long time. Lush Maryland fields had melted from New Jersey neon, plains of Empire State concrete from azure suburban Connecticut skies, the swaying Rhode Islandian wheatgrass tumbling out of the river-run Bay State metropolis of eastern Massachusetts, all birthed from the mountainous highways of New Hampshire; a blur of hour after countless hour of wheels on tarmac.

We’d been driving since the early afternoon, when the air was still inky and humid, flavoured with the oaken forests and distant mountain rain of a Maryland late March. I wondered for a moment why bad days always started out like good ones. Didn’t fate need to take time off every once in a while?

We pulled into a rest stop. It had been a while since I’d been on the road, and ‘quite right too’ my mother had worried, but the Little Black Book had made it so.

I leaned on the hood of the car, letting the early evening winds rustle my hair. I closed my eyes and thought of him. The way he would inhale deeply and wrap his arms around my neck, my cheek pressed tightly against his chest. I could smell the leather of his jacket and the musk of his cologne; his warmth from the late sun, which was setting and slicing through the strands of my hair.

As his heart beat through my jaw, I knew this was a moment I would always remember – the light, the quiet, the smell, his breathing – even in a distant future when the memory should have faded. The significance of our perpetual insignificance was suffocating, but I would still never feel as safe or as loved as I did with him.

I felt the outline of the book through the old jacket. It was hidden in the inside pocket, behind a layer of shearling. ‘Keep it close to your heart’. I smiled at the whisper of a memory.

We reached the base of the peak shortly after. It would take a little while to climb to the summit, but that was the point, I supposed. I walked in tandem with his shadow, always casting a veil of comfort from my right side. I could hear his boots crunch with each step of my own. Hear the faint hum of an obscure song he had stuck in his head. Feel the tick of his thoughts, forever whirring away behind a furrowed brow.

The smell of drying leaves underfoot brought back that normal January weekday; it had been raining hard. I was so desperate to go for that drive. I wanted to break our routine, inject some life back into our souls. ‘You’re always tired!’ I’d pouted. ‘I’m so stir crazy, I could die.’ Funny.

Standing on top of Sugarloaf, it was like I was on top of the world. I could see for miles and miles and everything was basked in sunlight. I took a Theology class once, about asceticism; how the starving begin to romanticize food. Endlessly dreaming about freshly baked muffins and hot buttered toast and sausages spitting fat from the pan. Now I understood them. I’d been starved for this post-apocalyptic light; a different sun, a different sky. A feeling of clarity amongst the wreckage.

I’d never really thought about it before, but it’s crazy how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale shimmer of Spring, when it feels like the sunsets are blushing; the crisp, blinding whiteness of a January morning; steel storm clouds and their nauseous hue just before electricity strikes over the mountains; and vintage blue afternoons, just like this one, when the air is still, the sky clean, and the sun is beating down like a slow grunge drum.

I swallowed. The Little Black Book was burning into my breastbone.

I gently removed it from its protective pocket. It was so heavy in my hands, so full of life, and days, and memories. As I ran my thumb over it’s mottled surface, I could see that the leather was still marked with the signs of a clumsy hand; a spilled coffee cup, a burst pen, a rushed lunch laughing over eggs and toast.

A small animal darted from the undergrowth, startling me. I caught the book before it fell, catching a glimpse of those words scrawled on the inside cover: ‘Keep it close to your heart’.

I saw the rain then. I saw the blinding lights slice through the black, heard the roar of glass and brakes and crushing metal. Felt the dagger of his screams. The sirens. The shouting. The flashes of fluorescent strips above and never ending double doors. The consoling whispers. The endless explanations. Wires. Beeps. Blood and tears.

It wasn’t really until I was signing my name on a dotted line, signing away his life, that I realised what had happened.

There had been a moment a few hours before when I thought my world might not change forever. He was smiling, even. He’d told me to go into his jacket pocket. That was the first time I’d ever seen the Little Black Book, ever even heard of its existence. "A Life In Colour", it said on the cover.

‘It’s the story of our lives,’ he’d whispered.

Writing those words on the inside page had been one of the last things he did before the silence.

Winter had almost turned its back on the countryside now, hinting at the balmy Spring to come. It had been uncharacteristically warm; the kind of weather that melts into a soft pink haze when the day starts to break, the sun dripping sherbet over a pale sky.

I’d had the cheque folded in my pocket for a few weeks now. But the thing was, his essence couldn’t be encapsulated into a small piece of paper with dollars and numbers in permanent ink. The money wouldn’t bring him back, even if the life insurance advisor seemed to think it should make things easier. His soul was in those pages. That was his legacy.

He’d taught me courage before he left. How life carries on for those left behind, even after death. ‘It is so beautiful to exist, my darling. The world was made to be seen through your eyes.'

I held the Little Black Book close and felt those words ring through me, as I ripped up the cheque and threw them to the wind. I would finish the book. I would live.

The pieces fluttered into the sunset like ash.

The truth of the matter was, I knew with all certainty, both in the mathematical sense and in that of the heart, that I would love him, and only him, always and forever, till the end of my days, despite others that may come in and out of my life, despite want or need for that feeling to pass, despite the possibility we may never again cross paths in the next life; it was him, infinitely.

Before I was a twenty-something widow - before I became the insider on the outside – a child of sorrow and ‘seize the day’ renegade; the hopeful, the harrowed, and the heartbroken; re-born as courageous and gaining faith a little more each day. I was really just a kid who hadn’t lived yet, a kid glued to normal.

And in the end, all I could think about were two things. The first was stupid and funny and almost ordinary: him telling me on a normal Tuesday that if he ever moved on from this life, at least I’d have enough cash to fuel my grilled cheese addiction for the rest of mine. The second was much simpler: It’s me or you.

I’d often wondered over these past weeks whether that was life’s whole purpose. One question, one answer. Living in the fallout of a choice: yourself, or someone else? One, or two. Reliable, or reliance. Knowing, or trusting. Destiny, or love.

Me, or you.

And as I came to terms with the way things had to be, looking into the eyes of my just passed present – the eyes of realisation, the eyes of the man who’d spent most our time loving me more than he would ever say, and the other begging for the end – I didn’t regret my choice for a second. But I couldn’t help wishing that there hadn’t been a choice in the first place.

I knew that if I hadn’t given him peace, I wouldn’t be tasting the first sips of loss. I knew that if I’d never begged him to take me for that late night drive, I’d never have our Little Black Book. But what I knew most of all, is that if I’d never agreed to that first date on a January night, I’d never have found him. I couldn’t, even for a second, be sorry about that.

Now, there was my heart, metaphorically stitched to our Little Black Book, exposed and aching for the world to see, soaking with a love I’d once been so ashamed to admit.

You see, the lines between good and bad, now and forever, the lover and the fighter are so often unclear. But it’s always terribly tragic when a Little Black Book is closed before the story ends. That is, I thought, if it ever really could be closed in the first place.