The Way We Cope with that Thing Called Life - Part 2.1

I remember one day when I opened my eyes with the sun. Her first soft yellow fingers tugged at the sides of the white curtains hanging just above my bed, trying to convince them to yield while coloring them a little bit at the same time. Those fingers tugged my heavy eyelids open, and she whispered in my ear that it was the start of a new and beautiful day. I tried rolling over, pulling the light quilt up to my nose and squeezing my eyes shut, but the sun simply chuckled, gently stole my blanket from my hands, and guided me off of my side and onto my back. At that point I gave up the struggle, knowing from prior experience that my opponent always wins at these types of games. No one has ever conquered the sun—except, I guess, those idiots who came up with Daylight Savings Time. But that was different.

I reached my arms away from me as far as they would go, balling my hands into fists and arching my back off the bed a little bit. A soft groan escaped my lips, though I stifled it quickly and relaxed back down onto the mattress that has supported my body for so many years, the mattress that had seen me grow from an awkward sixth grader to a perhaps slightly less awkward tenth grader. Or now, I corrected myself, eleventh grader. God, time had flown by.

I allowed my eyelids to drift shut once again, though I assured the ascending sun I would not return to that unconscious haven that is sleep. Though I supposed the sun has a point here. Here, there was no need to dread the early-morning sounds of an alarm ringing away its battery life or the heavy weight of a backpack slung across one shoulder. Here, there was only the gentle sound of waves crashing against white sand, the weightless feeling the saltwater gives you as you floated along the coast.

I rolled back onto my side, and my eyes drifted open and came to focus on the girl lying across the room from me on the bed only previously occupied by cousins with poop-brown hair or older sisters too cool to build sandcastles with a smaller, more desperate you.

But this girl, she was different. She was unlike anyone else I had ever met. She had skin the color of rich dark chocolate straight from Switzerland, hair the color of the midnight sky you can glimpse between a sea of stars on the clearest of nights. She had eyes like the soil used by only the most successful of farmers, eyes capable of raising the most nutritious of food and the most beautiful of flowers because of all of the ugliness they had seen and experienced already. She had cheekbones that could have sliced a diamond straight in two, though her cheeks were full and glowing beneath them. She had lips that were careful, reluctant to release the words they held captive from the rest of the world, though I remember that this only made the words that did manage to escape that much more powerful, all the more enticing so that when they came marching along, the world would put down whatever it was doing and go silent for a minute just so it could hear the words drip out, watch them dance through the air like the petals of a flower so majestic it can only bear to bloom every fifteen years.

Yes, she was different all right, and that was very reason why I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. I couldn’t bear to blink for fear that she wouldn’t be there when I opened my eyes once again. Watching her, even just as she slept that morning, made me feel like something in this world was right. She looked so calm, so relaxed, and the soft morning sunshine fell over her face at exactly the right angle, highlighted all of the right places. I felt a smile surfacing from somewhere deep inside me, and my eyes drifted shut once again.