When Life Gives You Lemons

Sun-Water

That's what she called lemonade: "sun-water;" she said it tasted like the first day of summer. She was my own little ray of sunshine--a glittering horizon delivering me into a whole new world as an apocalypse stole the only other one I'd ever known. Her mother hadn't survived long enough to see her, but I'd told her everyday since then that she was looking down from the sun.

It was no surprise then that she grew up loving sun, or that summer--when the sun warmed everything so undeniably that she insisted that her mother was hugging the whole world--was her favorite season.

The cruel irony that is the Universe's humor saw just how much the sun meant to the two of us. In a world so cold and dark with loneliness and loss, everybody needs their own sun to shine from somewhere.

And so the Universe gave us another sun. One so close and so hot that it burned away the others and blinded me to any more that might come. The warmth and brightness that had been a metaphor holding us together turned into a literal storm that night, and our personal symbols turned to smoke as a distant heaven was replaced by a fresh hell standing where our home once had.

The Universe and its cruel irony: a simple fire consuming a single house and, with it, burning away so many suns...

The firefighters' water turned to steam as woodwork and memories turned to ash. Gloved hands and muted warnings enveloped me, holding me back as the ear-splitting screams of my sun--my whole world--echoed from the depths of the blaze.

The only thing louder then the screams was the silence that followed them...

I live in darkness now. A cloud-white van filled with white-clad men with their heads in the clouds came to carry me away after I got into an argument with a display of small suns at a produce stand. The lemons offered no solace. There was no summer to be had with them. The daylight outside taunted me as a breeze from the unusually warm July afternoon warped the once romanticized ideas. The light wasn't the loving stare of a lost love, but a scornful glare of an emotionless star; the heat not of an embrace, but a suffocating existence.

They put me in a room with walls the color of citrus rind and a belted jacket the hue of a discarded lemon peel, a fluorescent sun shrieking like my dying sunlight until my echoing cries summoned a sour-eyed doctor to turn off the lights.

I live in darkness now, both in body and in mind.

The Universe and its irony stole all the suns from my heart, so I demand none over my head. I can almost begin to see some stars in the eternal night I've created...

But the man in the room across from mine keeps asking for lemonade.