Between the Distance

t w o :

I stare out the backseat window of the taxi cab at a gloomy Saturday afternoon sky. There is something mythical about Saturdays that I'm not quite sure I can put it into words. But they bring an eerie calmness. Saturdays are softening and milky and pink and nostalgic.

Well most of the times they are.

This Saturday the clouds are grey and heavy as if they are about to explode and pour down millions of tiny droplets all over the city. It's still early in the year but I think it's quite odd that it's so gloomy and that it might actually rain today.

Fat chance, but a chance nonetheless and that makes me extremely hopeful.

It was a gloomy borderline rainy day when I met my best friend Sasha. It was a pouring day when my grandmother spontaneously picked me up from school one afternoon and took me out for ice cream in the park. Well it was supposed to be the park, but the rain came down out of the blue so we sat in the parking lot of Lucky's Ice Cream and Sweets and scarfed down a two scoop mint chocolate chip and sherbet honey waffle cones. Odd combination I know.

My grandmother was always spontaneous that way, she didn't need any logical reasons to do things that people wouldn't normally do at times they wouldn't otherwise do them. Ice cream cones on a pouring wet afternoon. To her, it wet and cloudy weather was the perfect weather for ice cream.

It was days when the sun was shining just right, or in some cases it wasn't shining at all, and the clouds were in all the right places, when my grandmother would decides it was a perfect day. A perfect day to buy chocolate honey ice cream cones even though it was barely 60 degrees outside and pouring rain that was borderline a hail storm.

As I'm sitting in the backseat of the taxi cab, a faint wave of nostalgia washes over me. A nostalgia I can't really describe or explain. Oddly enough, starring out of transportation windows has always made me sleepy and nostalgic of a better world, far away from mine. I don't know why, but it does. As a child I imagined that world to be one in which flowers spoke novelties and the seas weren't salty, but instead sweet and the clouds were made of cotton candy or even just cotton. There's just something about passing the world slowly from the passenger seat of a vehicle that makes you see things, feel things you thought you were quite done feeling. In this case it's a dingy old cab that smells like days' old Chinese food and damp clothes, but somehow it still puts me at ease. It's an odd feeling, but I welcome it.

The world fades away and so do all of my problems, at least it feels that way. The relief of faded clouds and fully dense skies settle on to my shoulders, knocking away everything else. The red, blue pink and yellow neon signs from a rundown Thai food restaurants and late night lounges flash against the cab windows. I check my watch. It's only 2:41 pm and I think it's a tad early for a "lounge" to be open.

The taxi comes to halt outside of a little coffee shop called The Java Bean Hut at the corner of Main Street and Hanover Avenue. It's a fairly busy street during the day, and it's always bustling with busy, hungry people off from work for lunch break.

The Java Bean Hut has been my place for the past three years. It's always relatively quiet even when it's packed with coffee snobs and chatty college students. The smells escaping from the café kitchen fill my nose with reminders from my grandmother's kitchen that linger a bit before they fade away and new smells settle in their former places. This has been my place because it's the easiest place for me to think or write or just exist, well right after my grandmother's vegetable garden or the comfortable couch in the den.

The memories come rushing in like a freight train going downhill. I'm six or seven years old again wearing a pair of lavender overalls and yellow sandals. There are pictures of my mother everywhere. A couple on the coffee table, the stairway, the hallway upstairs, the hallway downstairs, and a few of my mother big eyed, smiling and stand tall and loyal on her nightstand. From her early childhood years to well into her teen years, to early adulthood where everything would eventually fall apart. In every direction I looked, I was constantly reminded of a woman I would never get a chance to meet. A woman whose breathtaking smile I'd never get the chance to see in person. A woman whose dark skin that beamed like copper and honey under just the right amount of sunlight and a headful of curly jet black ringlets that fell effortlessly from her round face and rested on gently on her shoulders. I always knew what she'd looked like but I never knew who she was and I couldn't grieve a woman I only knew from grainy old photos and teary eyed stories my grandmother would tell me whenever the sky wasn't blue enough or the sun didn't shine bright enough. Those days my mother became the sun.