How Blue Is Your Sky?

Having a nice little bout of insomnia this evening I took to one of my favorite insomniac past times- reading some of my old writing.

 

I was perusing a blog I used to keep on MySpace (I know…  MySpace), and came across an entry I made the day the Virginia Tech shootings happened.  This was how it started:

 

“The sky in Orlando today was that vibrant shade of blue that only exists in paintings. A blue so pure, so deep without being dark, that if you hadn't seen them before you wouldn't believe that clouds existed. The temperature dropped again too and so we're left with this beautiful day and a high of only 70 degrees. Breezy. Light. Breathable.”

 

I went on to talk about how this beautiful day was marred by what had happened.  A gunman killing at least 30 people.  At least 30 people.  We didn’t know yet how many.  We didn’t know that it would, more than 5 years later, remain the worst school shooting in American history.

 

I ended the entry with:

 

“I don't know. I wonder what their sky looked like today. I wonder if the sun was out and any of them decided to skip classes for the first nice day in a few weeks... Or if leftover rain from the storm lingered and so they thought, why get out of bed? And I wonder if the air will ever feel breathable to them again.”

 

A lot of you who know my writing also know that I wrote a piece about 9-11 for the stage that started with lines describing my own personal experience that day, and how I woke up looking at the sky and how blue it seemed…  “Like…  Electric blue.”

 

I remember the day, my freshman year of college, when we heard about Columbine.  The first of the tragedies of that nature to come.  We stood outside, in front of the theatre building, talking about how glad we all were to not be in a high school at that moment.  It was April.  And the sky was blue.  So blue that the clouds seemed almost neon in their contrast.  I remember thinking that, on the news, it looked like a pretty day in Colorado too.

 

A few weeks ago when a boy, a man I suppose, but a boy none-the-less, walked into an elementary school and killed 26 people, 20 of them small children, tiny children, I distinctly recall thinking, before I heard the news, what a beautiful day it was.  I know because I was sitting near a window in a restaurant where I could see a TV over the bar and I recall thinking what a strange sensation it was to be between the reality of beauty outside the window and the reality of horror on the television.

 

Strange, how beautiful it seems the day is each time the world spins out of control.  Never when it is dark and dreary, always when it is so beautiful it almost seems like a dream.

 

Maybe I am the only one who notices.

 

Maybe I am the only one who is supposed to.

 

I am always so profoundly affected by things like this.  My empathetic nature means I feel other people’s pain so deeply, to my core.  I can’t train my brain to stay out of the head of the people I have never and will never meet, feeling their fear, their sorrow.

 

Always on an exceptionally beautiful day.

 

The kind of day when everyone you bump into outside can’t help but say, “Man it’s such a nice day today!” As though we have to reaffirm that what we’re seeing is real.

 

In my memory, it was always the day I noticed first, not the heartache.  But now that I see the pattern, I have to wonder if it isn’t, in reality, the other way around.

 

At first I had hoped that my memory wasn’t tricking me and that the order I remembered it was the order in which it happened.

 

But then I thought, maybe…  Maybe I don’t hope that.  Maybe I hope that when something so senseless, so frightening, so heartbreaking occurs I can’t help but lift my eyes to the universe, God, mother nature, whatever you call it, and subconsciously say, “Please.  Please give me a sign that there is light and love and beauty and warmth and such natural magnificence in the world that I can believe there is more of all of those things than the other things creeping into this reality.  Please show me that if I am to be between these two realities that it is that beautiful, warm, inviting, blue sky that envelopes me in moments of sadness and chaos and not the dark, cold turmoil that violence brings.  Please show me that the tranquility I feel in those brief moments when I realize just how pretty the world is, is truly what the universe is meant to be.”

 

And in those moments, when it knows I need it most, the universe always answers back with an electric blue sky, piercingly clear air, and a warm sun to fill the void.  Usually a little breeze too, the kind that makes you close your eyes and take a slow, deep breath.

 

That must be it.  I don’t know that I can choose to believe my own memories over the possibility that the whole universe is reaching back to me when I stretch out my arms to it.  I think I choose to believe the memories are changed so that when I think back and feel the pang that comes with tragedy, it is quickly washed away in my minds eye by that terrific expanse of blue.  The world is just too beautiful for anything else to be true.