Sun-bleached blues
My inhospitable scrap of soil is a strip gashed in barren brindle. If an artist wanted to spread the images that splash across my retina there would be little applications for any colors except black, tan, and drab grays. If color were transmuted into sound then my home would echo with a hard, grating lament.
The only refuge from the bare landscape is the sea of faded blue that spins overhead. The glinting ferocity of the sun thwarts anything more then a short gaze into the heavens, but occasionally that is all that is wanted to shatter the visual tedium of the desolate tract. In the last few days a bone dry wind has guaranteed that even meager shadows are lost.
Moving on commences as he files through her clothes saying it's painful once in a while. He piles the treasures of her lifetime just inside the back door. It's my birthday and the six month anniversary of her death. Placing them in the car; taking them away there is a small sense of loss. After all, the end of our relationship was nearly a decade ago and while I nearly died of sadness she never called, never came to soothe. The sorrow was immeasurable. That vanished half a year ago along with the guilt. All that is left is breakable anger and if there was not a concerted effort to pay no heed to it, to not plunge into it head first and live with it until life was nothing more than a frenzied reliving of hellish proportions then the very being of myself would be lost.
A friend looks upon a picture of me from her funeral and cries wishing that our sadness were the same. The rage opens its emerald eyes to gaze only to have a firm hand clasped over its mouth. "Everyone grieves differently." I reassure them.
I don't know what is worse - the heat pushing like an infernal roar, or the loss of any inkling of hues. At first blush I would have to say the stream of shimmering heat that siphons liter after liter of perspiration. But the reality is they are rather evenly in step and loss is the only voucher of nature in this realm of grit that takes its own terrible toll. Maybe tomorrow the heat will die and the soft rumble of a blue-gray monsoon will erupt through the dirty film hanging over this ancient pueblo. We'll see ...
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