The hazy blue world in Europe

She was a blonde high-school classmate who wanted to become a missionary one day. On the bus ride home, she told me about a time when someone she knew got into a car accident and almost became decapitated, or was decapitated. I eventually learned what that meant. Those days were cold and grey from what I recall. Sports jackets and pathetic blue jeans. Rice paper powder face and straight long hair. Cold wet basements and visions of a blue house along with thoughts on what it’s like to be grown and to be so far away from all this darkness here. Across the seas and straight to Europe, people probably lived a better life. Riding a car around blue hills with headphones on. From the basement window, the bleak daylight used to shine where I stood. And my heart would skip thinking about the college guy who could save me. He sat at the dinner table with a pack of cigarettes. He had a checkbook and a history of love affairs. I keenly listened and made glamorous assumptions about the adult world and was jealous of him and his freedom and all that. It was sad thinking about what could have been in those times of eye liners and flare jeans. Maybe weekend trips to California and a dark haired boy to go out on dates with and to brag about. But those were tied to dreams with the blue hills and convertibles; far out of my reach. In order to live you have to have cheap thrills so that’s where his cigarettes and stories came in. Those were hopeless cold times and my skin was pale and the clouds were grey and my eyes twinkled at whatever that flickered before me.

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