Blue

I can’t see out of these glasses anymore. 

I went back to visit my real life, looking in through the dirty panes. 

I walked into the road empty-handed, and while I stood there, blind, in the middle of the street, the cars roared by me on either sidewalk. Belching, I think, exhaust from fifty years ago.

Little old divorced lady in the middle of Indiana. 

Seven, eight years ago, in the waning months of what had always been my real life, I walked to the eyecare center down the street with the man who had always been my real husband and he picked out a pair of large rectangular blue glasses for me. He always said I looked wonderful in blue.

A little later, carelessly, he took me to Berlin and said oh, whoops, I love you a whole bunch but being married to you for the rest of my life just doesn’t float my boat, so, um, bye.

My brain had often gotten compliments before, but it stopped working. I wore the big blue glasses everywhere and they got the compliments. I stammered, oh, thanks, my, uh, husband picked them out for me, right before he, uh, threw me away. 

I went to California and went on a date in the middle of the day in a dog park in Berkeley with a man who turned out not to have a dog, or only a dead one, and he told me my picture on the dating site was terrible and my blue glasses were hideous.

I came back to Indiana and went dancing. At the dances, men in bright red glasses said oh, I love your blue glasses. Women and men in colorful glasses said, nice glasses. People said blue is your color! I bought blue clothes to go with my blue glasses.

I went to meet a man from Columbus, Indiana in Nashville, Indiana, about halfway between us, and we sat on the porch of the rocking chair store in the rain. We leaned close to each other and talked and listened and looked into each other’s eyes. He mentioned my glasses. I said my ex-husband picked them out for me. He said, “it figures.”

I started to think maybe if blue had been my color because husband said so, maybe now I needed to have a new color because he wasn’t the boss of me anymore. 

I said to my new dear friend who helps me make sense of the world, will you help me pick out new glasses? and she went to the eyecare center with me and did. They were rust-red and wonderfully witchy-angled with striped earpieces and I carelessly laid the old blue ones aside.

I went to meet a man from Louisville, Kentucky, in Columbus, Indiana, which I thought was about halfway between us. In a park in Columbus there was a rounded, asymmetrical arbor built of thorny grapevines, and inside that arbor there were benches that backed up into the grapevines, and on those benches we sat, and leaned close to each other and talked and listened and looked into each other’s eyes. I took off my rust-red glasses and perched them on top of my head, the better to lose track of time and space with him. A little later, as we rose to keep walking through the park, I felt for them on my head and found them on the ground instead, hopelessly scratched. 

I drove home to Bloomington peering through the scratches, walked to the eyecare center, and was told that nothing could be done for those lenses. Expensively, the lenses had to be replaced. In the meantime I wore the blue glasses.

I found an old pair of purple glasses. The rust-red glasses came back re-lensed. The blue glasses went missing. The purple glasses were missing an earpiece and the old transition tinting had turned the lenses permanently yellow but when I couldn’t find the red pair they could help me see, perched crooked on my nose. I found an old pair of turquoise-green glasses, but one of the lenses fell out and then the whole pair went missing. The old purple half-pair was sort of helpful. The blue ones were nowhere to be found. I kept thinking I saw them (on the deep blue shelves of the bedroom furniture the cabinetmaker made for me and my husband minutes before he wandered off), but I kept being mistaken. 

A pandemic came. Dancing happened over Zoom. I cleared space on the floor of my bedroom and set the laptop on the blue shelves and twirled and waltzed and swung and whirled on every square inch of the bare wooden floor next to my bed. One day when I was in the far back corner of the space I looked up towards the laptop and saw a couple of shelves higher something blue and there, too high up to see except from that very back corner, were the blue glasses. 

I took turns wearing blue and red. The day came when the red ones, the witchy angled rust-red glasses with the striped earpieces, went permanently missing. I hadn’t seen them in months. I wore the old blue ones instead now, all the time. They were a little scratched, a little disorienting, old prescription and all. Finally a beautiful young Austrian woman walked me to the eyecare center and helped me pick out a new pair, a big rectangular berry-red pair.

I lost the blue ones. I had new berry-red ones. All was well. We began to dance in person again, wearing masks, and my glasses kept slipping off my face because of the mask. And falling and hitting the floor. I would tuck them into my neckline to keep them a little safer. 

I went to the grocery store in my mask. While I was trying to pay for my groceries the berry-red glasses fell to the floor. Not once but twice. I tucked them into my neckline. I walked to the car and leaned over to put the bags away and the glasses kept swinging forward into my way. I took them off and put them on the driver’s seat, knowing I wouldn’t be able to miss them when I sat down. Put the rest of the bags from the cart into the backseat. Put the cart away. Came back and sat down hard on the glasses. 

My dear friend who helps me make sense of the world came over to help me organize the red-yellow dresser top and the deep blue shelves, and from the depths of buttons and earrings and fabric dolls and mirrors, she pulled out the blue glasses, and then the witchy-angled rust-red ones. They still had the deep scratches on the nosepiece. 

In the rain on the street I stand in my beautiful hand-me-down plaid-lined raincoat with the pockets weighted with glasses. I’m walking to the eyecare center down the street. I’m wearing my witchy-angled rust-red glasses with the scratched nosepiece. I’m carrying the berry-red sat-upon glasses to get fixed. And I’m taking my big old blue rectangular frames to get brand-new lenses put in.

Little old divorced lady in the middle of Indiana. This is my real life. I can see it very clearly. Blue is my color.