BLUE SUN, YELLOW SKY

Chapter 2 -- Change

My apartment, a hole in the wall studio that once served as the third bedroom in someone’s house, was small but cozy. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had only one requirement: that I be near the beach. It was an incredibly naive desire considering my entire net worth at the time was equivalent to a beat-up, fifteen-year-old Pontiac Sunfire.

On the upside, coming from a three-bedroom apartment shared among four women in Manhattan, this was an upgrade. Rectangular in shape, my apartment featured a carved out nook for the kitchen to the far right, my living/sleeping area in the center, and a disproportionately large bathroom on the opposite end. I painted in my apartment, so where someone else might have had a TV console I had a simple wooden easel and stool on top of a large brown tarp. Next to that stood a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of color pigments neatly arranged in jars, a row of paintings stacked in the adjacent corner, and a small leather couch.  Forty feet from my doorstep, the sand marked the beginning of the beach, and 150 feet beyond that, the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps it was the astrological Pisces in me, but the moment my toes sank into the sand, I knew I was home. 

On nights when I was plagued by insomnia, caused either by stress or the terrible choice to drink caffeine before bed, I tossed and turned until the sun peaked above the horizon. Then, throwing on sweats, I’d head to the beach to watch its light slowly illuminate the earth. The morning after my gallery opening was one such day.

Before the tourists could crowd the boardwalk and jam the bike lanes, I grabbed my family photo album off the shelf and headed for the shore.

The sun was already burning through the morning Pacific fog as I sat listening to the sound of waves crashing gently into the sand in front of me. Two playful dolphins surfed the breaking waves near the shore. It was a day just like this one that I got the phone call about my parents’ car accident. They’d been hit by a teenager who was texting with her boyfriend instead of paying attention to the red light in front of her. The Jeep Grand Cherokee she was driving went barreling into my parents’ Infinity sedan like a monster truck running over a go-kart. Four years had passed and I still missed them all the time. 

I opened up my family album to the only photo of my dad and me. I’m seated on his lap with a cup of hot chocolate in my hands, as he tells me a story from the album. The two main characters arehe and my mom. After getting married, but before they had me, they traveled around the United States and to a few foreign countries together and the album was a timeline of their love story. 

I turned to a photo of my mom and dad at the top of Half Dome in Yosemite. Standing on the beak, my dad is posed to jump and my mom is standing behind him with both hands on her cheeks and a look of horror in her eyes. The first time I remember him telling me that story, he said my mom was scared but he told her not to worry. My dad apparently knew how to fly. And together they soared down the mountainside gliding over waterfalls and rivers and even saluted a roaring black bear before returning to their campsite. 

My dad liked to embellish his stories. Sometimes they’d be regular travel log type stories and other times he’d add in mythical creatures or give himself superpowers. Another story he told involved him having to defend Mom from a hungry tiger. “You can’t tell from this picture, but just to the left, only a few feet away was a massive, larger-than-life Tiger. And boy was he hungry. Lucky for me, I had a bologna sandwich in my backpack, and everyone knows that tigers love bologna. I held it out and he delicately stuck it between his teeth before disappearing down the mountain.”I could still hear the intonations of his voice as I repeated these stories to myself time after time. 

As I got older the stories stopped—I don’t remember when or why exactly. But looking back I regret not asking for more. Rich in memories, I valued the real as much as I cherished the fiction. When I felt lonely, the stories connected me to them and I felt their presence like a warm embrace.