Nothing but Your Skin - Cathy Ytak [5]
The night I told you about my family, I was wearing my black pants and a pale green T-shirt under my dark-green sweater. I wasn’t very happy because I thought my blue gloves didn’t match the green. But then you showed me the tree and the bird singing in the tree, and I wanted that bird to sing for a long time, just for us. Later, you told me that you used to dream of studying birds—an ornithologist is what you called it. And later, I understood why it could only be a dream.
But you weren’t just watching the robin. You were watching me, too. And I thought it was nice to be looked at that way. So I started taking even longer than usual to pick out my clothes, and that made my mother mad. “Louella, are you ready?” No. “Well, what the heck are you doing in there?” She’d come into my room. “What? You’re still in your underwear? What difference does it make if your T-shirt is red or white? You’re putting a sweater on top. No one will even see it!” Yes, but I don’t like it when one color doesn’t go with another. All day I would feel like I was forcing the blue to live with the red…and how would that red get along with this pink—so pale, so delicate? It would hurt it, it would snuff it out. I have a complicated relationship with colors, it’s true. The more I struggle to decide, the more I think I shouldn’t, that it isn’t normal to take this long. So I lose my train of thought, I get confused, and then I don’t even want to get dressed anymore. It always ends the same way: my mom is in a hurry, she’s worried that I’ll miss the bus and she’ll have to drive me to school, and she chooses my outfit for me. “This is what you’re wearing and that’s it! Louella, you’re worse than a baby!” So she thinks, like everyone else does, that I can’t make a decision.
One night I told you about that, Matt. You said, “Colors, for me…” At first, you just told me that you didn’t see them exactly the way I did and that’s why you liked winter, when there was snow everywhere, because white was a “sure” color. That’s what you said to me, “a sure color,” and I was too shy to ask you what you meant. Then you explained it to me. You’re colorblind. There are colors that you don’t see the way I see them. Which ones? Red and green. They look kind of the same to you. Ripe strawberries look the same color as the leaves on the strawberry plant. I thought that was strange. I asked you if it was hard to live like that, and you stopped a moment before saying, “Hard? No, it’s not usually hard. I ask my brother when I’m not sure about the color of clothes. But for certain jobs, it is hard. When you have to work with precise colors, when you have to know if something is red or green, for example. When you want to describe a…” You stopped there. I looked at you and I thought you were going to cry. But maybe it was just that it was so cold and the north wind was blowing into our eyes. But your mouth was sad, too, and I couldn’t explain that away. I thought about the last thing you said: “When you want to describe a…” Describe a bird? Describe the color of its feathers? Is that what you wanted to say, Matt? Because you’re colorblind, you can never be an ornithologist? You told me that you were doing a certificate in carpentry. That your uncle had just moved near here and you were staying with him, but that you were going to leave to do your apprenticeship soon, before the end of the year.
That night, we didn’t talk about anything else. You stayed on your path and I watched you disappear into the night. Your steps were slow, like the sound of our grandfather clock…bong, bong, bong…the same