Repressing

He had so many questions and they were shadowed by answers that were futile to both of us. He asked if I liked my new place, he asked what I had planned for tonight, he asked how my grandma was doing – things he knew the responses to. He also asked about the weather even though we shared today’s weather. And just when I rolled my eyes at that last question and told him that the sky is, as usual, blue, and that I have to hang up because my batter is low, the sun steeped lower in the horizon and erased all the blueness I once thought there was instilled in our celestial sphere, in our heavens, in our sky.

I held the phone against my chin and stayed breathing with him in silence through the crackle of the static on the phone as I looked out the window. All of that blueness, all of it across the ceiling of our universe, was suddenly not there. I saw purple, red, orange and pink. I saw grey, white, yellow and brown. I saw streaks of what looked like blue but what was really green. I saw a form of blue called indigo, but it was leaning on violet with just an eyelash of blue.

I did not see blue in her entire individual royalty. Blue was momentarily missing from the sky.

“Hello? Did you hang up already?” He asked. No. No was all I said. I should have said something else, something extraordinary. I should have just been honest. However, for the life of me, I could not take back my verdict to him about the solid blueness of the sky. If I were honest, it’s not that he would ever ask twice about what I saw, nor that he would doubt that the sky was blue. He wouldn’t bother to look to debate this observation. But let’s say that he did look out, and had a thought or more, would it have been different between us? No. This is too minutiae of an IF to fathom.

So I remained silent and shared nothing with him. I let the sky be as absolute as its usual given colour. I let ordinariness walk in between us like a sneering rich woman in high heels walking through the slums and I hung up the phone, selfishly guarding all the real blue-less colours of the sky to myself, while leaving the colour blue to him.

_{Beisan A. Alshafei}

_{August 7th, 2019}