Green and Red

Today, I went for a walk. There was a man mowing his front lawn and two other men discussing grass, I’m sure they saw me and moved aside. Then a woman in a car, she sat looking poignantly at me and I wondered what she thought when she saw me. I saw she was beautiful and reflected upon my own face: can you really see a past inside the eyes? Dark pupils once black dots becoming rich, becoming deep, oceans of memories. Do we really see that? Or do we just see our own hopes and dreams reflecting back up at us?

Walking on my own and I can pay attention. I never used to think about the way that being on my own was so crucial to being with you. How everything I ever saw was just an internal memo to tell you later, so you could inject life into it and suddenly make it far more beautiful.

You’re green and I’m red; we decided this long before you’d ever been to London. Something we said in the field round the back, whilst balancing pizza in one hand, a cricket bat in the other and the ball flying through the blue sky. We were always surrounded by trees, as the woods were on either side of us but we didn’t see it like that. We saw the whole field as our den and the rest of the world wasn’t allowed in, unless, of course, they were bringing pizza.

I mimicked the sound of the ball hitting the racket, “Whack!” but the slice was making it difficult to chew out the word and it sounded a little more like, “black.” It was that day we chose our colours.

“I’ll be red because I am the fire.” You said and I didn’t disagree. You were the flame, hurtling up into the sky, you were most certainly red.

“I’ll be green because I’m like the grass.” I picked a load and threw it in the sky and wished I was the fire.