Yellow, has always been my favourite colour.
It was a yellow sky, and I was seeing stars in front of my eyes. It wasn’t because I had hit my head particularly hard or anything. It was the pattern glinting off her scarf. She tilted it so the pattern of stars caught the sunlight and reflected brilliantly. Right into my eyes. I groaned as I tried to hit the scarf away from me. She just laughed delightedly. It was a giggle of mirth. Pure delight at a new game.
“Sadistic bitch”, I muttered.
I groaned again, this time from the attempt to get up. I just couldn’t. I guess I had hit my head pretty hard. But instead of helping me up she just jumped around with that glorious threaded scarf. It was a thing of beauty. Just like her. It was what the night sky would look like if it was lit up by the colours of the sun. Yellow like a submarine from a Beatles song, it was lighter than a flame dancing in the breadth of a whisper. It seemed to be singing as it flitted to fit elegantly around her neck.
A neck I felt like strangling right now.
She smiled at the slowly turning orange sky as she collapsed down beside me. I refused to look at her. She gently punched my arm. I refused to respond. Then she did the most unfair thing of all.
She started to tickle me.
I rolled away laughing. The moment had broken. We were both laughing. Or was this the moment now?
We stopped laughing for a rare moment of silence as the sky painted over the last of its yellow shades to make a canvas of black interrupted only by the stars reaffirming the lateness of the hour.
We both held our breaths simultaneously. She was the first to let it out. She was always the first to let it go. I remembered briefly how I had come to be lying on the ground in the first place. It had been a long way up the tree. And an even longer way down, as I was aided by her words on the way up, and aided by gravity on the way down.
She got to her feet and pulled me to mine. She always did that. Help me get into trouble and then out of it. She would never lead, but she would coax me to move.
How I fell for it every time is still a mystery to me.
But mysteries are always fascinating aren’t they. The heroes of mystery stories always move stealthily like cats. And she moved like a cat too. And it was curiosity that killed her.
She urged me to explore the shining bit of star on the road. The star that was a glint of a shadow. The shine of the oncoming car was just so much brighter. I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t move. Until something very fast, swathed in something very yellow pushed me out of the way as the sound of screeching tires filled my consciousness, and she silently slipped out of hers.
The threat of losing a moment with someone is eclipsed by the threat of losing someone in a moment.
Yes. Yellow is my favourite colour, because it reminds me of her. Still laughing, as the threads of yellow flit like a flame dancing in the breadth of her whisper.
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lalala
samvida
"The threat of losing a moment with someone is eclipsed by the threat of losing someone in a moment."
ReplyDeletelovely. :)