True to Blue
A story
Her veins pulsate with a life of their own under blue-black skin like a layer of ice spread thinly, almost indistinctly, across a translucent baking sheet. Speckles of blood force themselves to the surface of her cheek where his hands laid yesterday, where they strike today, and where they will bound to caress tomorrow. Where she will bound to let them touch in apology.
Linearity of time eludes her. They come and go like the passing of the tides, imposing their existence only by dips and bumps in the sand. So time comes to her only as a punctuation of life — a breaking through of reality into the encompassing wrath of his passing feelings: dipping in moments of perceived love, heaping up in eternities in anticipation and defense of abuse. She never was able to tell the time, so a minute passes according to his demand. The hand of the clock bows to his own smiting hand.
Hello, my name is Blue.
Blue? That’s unusual.
It’s just a nickname. My real name is…
“Nick!” Her voice cracks the ice of his frozen conscience — the good one — and his fist shivers in the atom of space between bruising knuckles and an even bruised up jaw. A shadow reminiscent of guilt eclipses his face, fallen like betrayed angels. Pathetically, as though a demonic entity had taken control of his body. It halts. He suddenly recognizes the human beneath the red, pulsing punching bag.
“Oh, god. Oh, my god, Amelie, no.” The fist unclenches, his voice softens, but what is done is done. “I’m so sorry. I’m so-”
Why do they call you Blue?
Because I’m always blue, can’t you tell? Always brooding, always angry.
What had seemed and appeared so endearing then, so in need of fixing, confirmed her downfall. Blue — always brooding. Always, always, always angry. What she had not anticipated then, and what she cannot wrap her head around the first and subsequent times it happened, was that anger is inevitably redirected. One wrong word, one chastising look, one undercooked chicken, and one bloodied nose. One swollen cheek. One split lip.
The man who reads her poetry in bed and scribbles love letters on scraps of unpaid bills disappears under the devil who beats, who strikes, who growls and yells and dictates life and death to their choosing. Yet, she thinks, they are the same person, aren’t they? Nick and Blue, Nick and Blue, Nick is Blue. Though such passing recollections of who this man standing beyond her was is always only in passing — a small acknowledgment of “sorry” draws the line between Nick and Blue. Blue is possessed. Blue hits. But Nick apologizes, Nick loves. And it is in this faint imitation of an imposed boundary that she finds the solace and the ability to stay with him.
He says in a small voice “it won’t happen again, I promise. Oh, I promise. Please, forgive me.” Perhaps in mimicry, though she doubts it, he possesses the voice of the young boy hiding behind his mother’s pleated skirts, the young man cowered behind shelves and shelves of ancient literature; of men just like him: dual, shy, angry, savage, repenting. But in that small voice the looming foreknowledge that it will happen again booms. Of course, it will happen again, and of course, she will forgive him. Even if Heaven denies him their pearly gates, even if Hell turns him away, as long as there is a man on earth named Nick, named Blue, a woman called Amelie, who roams the land of green earth, always forgives him.
Why, is it a different matter neither of them can come to understand. Only that she will, and only that he will accept it. He will cradle that whisper of “it’s okay” in the center of his palm, as though God had descended to his level and given it to him, and he will nourish it with repentance, only for such a fragile pearl of a word to be crushed when open palms dissolve into clenched fists.
Perhaps one day, he will stop. Perhaps one day, she will leave. Perhaps one day she will look onto the clock and see that the sixty beats that recount a minute of his wrath are the same sixty beats that dictate one minute of his love, and she will realize that she had spent half her life loving only half of him.
But one day is a hopeless clinging onto a time that will never come.
