Blue

(Notes: This was written for a contest, some literary magazine/journal, I don’t remember which one. The theme was “the color blue”, not-surprisingly. The one and only time, I think, that I built a story for a contest like that (and no, I didn’t win, I know so sad, boo-hoo). I don’t remember when exactly I wrote it, but I’m guessing the fall of 2009. I know it was after the first batch of stories I wrote, in the spring/summer of ‘09, and I’m pretty sure it was before I moved to Austin. There are definitely things in it that were new for me; that wasn’t the intent, I mean I wasn’t purposefully trying to expand/experiment. But I wasn’t doing a lot of writing at the time, and I think it’s an example of what can come up during those kinds of periods; when you stop writing for awhile, new stuff comes up when you come back to it. For me, I think the important development was the discovery of a new way to write about my life. Finding my way out of the journaling mode, which was my typical process, and instead figuring out how to take things from my life, and write them down in story.)

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Once upon a time I had sex with a girl.

We had met just a few hours previously, in a bar in San Diego. I had come to visit my friend during my spring break. I was a student, he had a job. I was on vacation, he wasn’t. Thus, it being a Wednesday and a work-night for him, he went to bed. Me, I was on vacation, so I walked across El Cajon boulevard to the bar.

I went in, I sat down at the bar. I ordered a drink. I was wearing what I considered to be a weird outfit. Some hat that didn’t suit me, sweatpants; just things that didn’t quite work together, just a bit off. I drank my drink, I looked to the left, there was a girl sitting there, a stool between the two of us. She was looking at me and smiled. I smiled back, looked further left, turned back to my drink, sipped it. Looked over to my right, just scoping the scene, the possibilities. When I turned back to my drink I found that the girl on my left had moved over onto the bar-stool directly next to me.

Um. Okay.

She was well on her way to being “faded”, my friend’s most-often used term for being drunk. Not incoherent at all, but just past the boundaries. It didn’t take her long to tell me that I was cute. It didn’t take her much longer to sort of grab my arm and ask if she could take me home with her.

Um. Okay.

We left the bar shortly thereafter. Outside on the sidewalk she had a mild argument with strong undercurrents with another guy, apparently a male co-worker. Regardless of the masked way in which it presented itself, it was about him not wanting her to go home with me.

But she’d already made her decision. She had me for the night and she wasn’t going to let me get away.

So we got into her car and drove to her house, a few blocks away. On the way there she talked about her work in a petty and tiring fashion which I gave “uh-huh”s to and tried to ignore.

Her house was dark when we came inside. She apologized for the mess but just barely, perfunctorily, too tired to really pay the matter more than lip-service. She just didn’t really care anymore.

She didn’t turn any lights on, I think; maybe the bathroom light, and then closed that door. In her dark, dim bedroom she grunted slightly as she shoved piles of clothes off the large bed. Her two children were elsewhere, out of the house that night. Maybe at grandma’s.

We got into the bed, started moving together. Slowly, languidly, a lazy erotic charge muddying the water, disambiguating the relations: embers that burned a bit brighter in being blown upon, but were too tired to really consider re-becoming flames.

The clothes were off before we got into the bed, or shortly thereafter. I remember the way she moaned, softly, as I pushed it inside. I remember the sense of pleasuring her, of using my body to provide her with release. I remember the sense of going through the motions; not without a measure of feeling, not empty, just a sense of going through the motions. Of knowing how I was going to move.

I wasn’t wearing a condom. I’d imbibed her tiredness, entered into her state of dreamy exhaustion, and neither of us mentioned protection. After a little while I came; came in her, came into that darkness. And we lay still, and shallow breathing, and it slows, and slower. The river of sleep rose up around us and carried us, carried us away on its pillowed currents of dream.

So, my question is: is that blue? Is what I wrote about it blue? Was the experience itself a blue experience?

Hm. Well, my initial inclination is to say: yes. Being in possession of a mind skilled in the arts of equivocation, I typically go with my gut these days; have decided that it’s usually right, or at least that letting it just make these decisions for me saves a whole lot of hem-hawing time.

And so yes. Blue. What made it blue? This place that I’m sitting in now while thinking back to then, this place isn’t blue. It’s green and yellow, warm and softly lit. There’s some brown, dabs here and there of other colors. But it’s not blue.

What makes something blue. What made that blue.

I was thinking, at first, of the reference to pornography. Blue as the depiction of sexual acts. But what I wrote obviously, at least for me, conjures the blue of sadness.

I have come to think of sexual intercourse as an act that inescapably opens a portal through which souls interchange, through which a portion of my soul takes leave of me and a portion of someone else’s soul enters into mine. A blue ghost, maybe, a pale blue irridescent ghost that shimmers, that sighs.

But the blue that refers to pornography seems like a much deeper blue, a darker blue, a blue that’s hard to see into, hard to gauge its qualities of depth and meaning. Very hard. A blue that’s a purposeful obscurity, that dares you to delve into it and is also, somehow, at the same time scared that you actually will. A black blue, a blue that’s dark and bruised.

Shortly after, a few days after, there was a letter I wrote; to myself or someone else, I don’t remember which now. I wrote of it, of the central moment I wrote something like:

“I held my body over hers, took for both of us the rain of tiny sharp points that fell down from above, covered her with my body and let them fall down across my back and into me.”

Which is true. And they were blue, sharp points of blue that were light or that caught the light in crystal facets, that came in a soft rain from the darkness where the ceiling had been, that rained down silently and sank into my body. Maybe I cried, maybe I cried invisible indigo tears, drops like a steel-blue water that fell across her face: that ran into her mouth as she quivered like a sleeping child god.

I wonder if she remembers. I wonder if for her, as for me, the letters of the name of the person she was with that night have since blurred into illegibility. Just a wash of once-known, lost blue figures across the page.

(I wrote a book called This is Love. You can buy it here. Find out more at: http://www.jeremyjaeger.com/)