For Library Spit.
Ever since I was young, I held a deep fascination with soul mates. My grandmother used to sit me on her lap and tell me about how beautiful the world became when she met my grandfather. She told me the way she felt when the colors began to seep in and how she felt as they began to seep away again. Though my grandfather had died, she said that she never forgot the way things had looked to her.
As I grew older, my mother told me stories about my father and their relationship. Sometimes she grew teary eyed as she spoke of their first few years together. When she first met him, it was when they were both adults; my mother worked in my grandfather’s store, my father worked in his neighbor’s fields. My mother described a day that she was making a delivery to a farm on the road my father worked on. It was hot and bright and the cicadas were whining. My mother thought about how refreshing it would be to go swimming in the lake after work. As she came upon one farm, she noticed a change in the landscape. The field of wheat began to change from its normal shade of gray. Could it be color? My mother wondered. Her heart began to flutter in her chest as she realized the rest of the landscape started becoming “colored”. It is known that the world gains color as the meeting of soul mates approaches.
Her eyes and my father’s met at the same moment. My mother described that moment as an explosion of light and color. It became clear in an instant how dull life had been before. Meeting my father had changed everything in her life, in a way only surpassed by my birth, and losing him.
I know my mother had changed so much when my father died, even though I was young when it had happened. I didn’t like the way her and my grandmother had been changed by death, and as I grew up, I was determined to avoid the same fate. I knew it wasn’t possible, though, when one day I realized that I had begun to see color.
