MY BABY BLUE.

Every day, sometimes every hour, in a comment or from the lips of the guys and girls there’s always that sentence that connects the colour of one’s eyes to love and nothing else. I can’t blame those people for doing such a cliché thing, merging the four-lettered word respected by the world to the sight of one coloured by God. I do not blame them because I too believe in the connection with another by the description of their eyes’ colour…at least NOW I believe. How did I believe? It’s quite a story really and one I never tire to tell. It’s a story of love in ways I thought untrue, it’s a story of connections that go beyond blood, it’s my story and it began in what I always love to call Winter’s Blue; On a morning of frost and snowflakes, I Miss Cooney May, rose from my bed of a hundred whites wrapped up like a Christmas present by a huge blanket which swept the wooden floor of the my grandmother’s cabin. I was twenty three then and I was just another youth seeking peace in the midst of the wild. Sloth was a friend indeed for I took my time with everything I did. I was so sluggish, my seconds were minutes. I could be called a hibernating human. The wicked chill of the winter slowed me down. I sat on a red couch in a small wooden-walled space called the sitting room, just by the fire place so pretty, engraved in dark metallic rods kissed by metallic leaves that swirled like dancing fairies in black. A round wooden table stood in the middle of the room surrounded by three cane chairs and a sofa kissed by the colour peach. The kitchen a simple assembly of a few burners, a kettle and some other utensils stood by the living room like a bar. It was exquisite yet so funny and sad since there was no actual bar and I was quite the drinker. For the bedroom, it was my favourite place. You could smell the aged oak on its walls and the countless sheets, dimmed lights, single window and its closeness to the bathroom, gave my heart a certain warmth I still can’t explain. Anyways, that morning was like every other in my four months escapade to the woods. Ignored all the calls I got while I sat with a Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Style or whatever fashion magazine I pre-ordered. The calls kept coming and a thousand messages by the beep but I always let the whistle of the kettle lead my ears. If I focused on the calls, I would be reminded of home, New York City. There was so much I left in the city. My parents, friends, my acting career, my modelling career, my lover Tom Haze…I had cut a lot from my life but I really didn’t care. My parents never got enough from me, the ‘friends’ were just attachments to the bling I had on from head to toe, my acting and modelling career kept me far from my true self. But the one thing I thought true was Tom Haze. Oh! Tom Haze and those fiery ember eyes of his! Well that got broken too, I’ll explain in due time. This is a tale of my winter blue so I’d rather get to the point. The kettle kept whistling, the aroma of coffee stained the wooden walls and swirled around me. I inhaled and felt peace. I loved the smell of coffee but I never liked the taste. I just prepared it because it reminded me of…yeah you’re right. It reminded me of Tom Haze. It was the smell that always welcomed me every morn when I woke up in his bed. So you see, Tom was the only meaningful truth I loved back in New York and tears measured by buckets just had to deal with our separation. My ears were still fed by the whistling pot which I knew could dry up at any minute, when I heard something else. I closed my eyes, opened them again and just sat still. The sound was gone, but just before I flipped open another page of the Nylon magazine in my hands, I heard it again. It stopped. I turned to a pretty heart-shaped wall clock just a few inches above the fire place. It was seven o’clock. I thought the sound imaginable since my grandma’s cabin was well, quite far from hiker’s reach in such an early hour. The sound came through once more like a hum and then a shriek. I pressed my palms against my ears and let my arms free. The sound stopped. It was truly frustrating. Call me fancy diva but I hated interruptions on ‘reading time’. I got up and turned off the burner. The kettle’s steady whistle came to an abrupt end and all the sounds of good nature became clear. Birds chirped, squirrels squeaked, waters in almost frozen streams walked by in mild iced paces and ripples too gentle to be heard. I opened the cabin’s door and stood at the porch. Yes, the ‘cabin’ wasn’t by the name. A small house made of logs. Not exactly. My grandmother was an idol in her time, so the description of her cabin would be an investment in ‘grands’ and not cents. It was a beautiful smallish flat made strictly of wooden material, furniture and interior decorations, every member of my family just called it the cabin. Still wrapped by the huge blanket that had a hundred pictures of me sewn in cotton, I stared at the space around me while my hands were supported by the wooden railings on the porch. It snowed in flaked and silent puffs. It was a pretty sight. The silence had kissed my soul and I was being drained into the depths of the white vastness, but the sound interrupted again! It was clearer this time. It was a cry and a loud one. I paced around the house and saw nothing. “Perhaps a mother and a child nearby.” I thought. But the sound was repeated over and over. I rushed into the cabin, put on everything that told the cold I cared for frost bites and dashed out. When I got back outside, I took a stick in my hand and like a mountaineer I moved up the sloped hill, from the cabin at the hill’s foot. I walked into a thicket of bushes and trees with bald, darkened braches spewing grains of white. The cry got clearer and weaker. I hoped to find the source quicker before the sound died off. After a few more steps I kicked something and the sound shot right into my ears in a loud shriek. I looked down and saw a basket. I recognized the cry but this wasn’t the era of Moses so I refused to believe the suggested conclusion my higher senses opted to me. I wasn’t ready for such. I open the basket and there it was. My instincts were right. A baby! Surely, I had said I wasn’t ready to care for a child if that was the outcome so I turned away while I picked it up. I didn’t want to get attached. My eyes began to search for the closet path to civilization. “I could drop her off at the sheriff’s or a church door…” Decisions soared within the walls of my brain. While lost in thoughts, a gentle force pulled at my coat. I looked at my arms. A little fist, so pale, it could be white, held unto my clothing. I looked at the little human’s eyes. They were closed. “I’m sorry I can’t do this! I don’t deserve you…no…I don’t want you and I don’t care how cute you are. I’m just gonna get a cat instead.” I told the little one. I took off my gloves and my fingers lifted the white wool clothing wrapped around the child. My eyes strolled downwards, “A girl!” I screamed. “Yeah, your kind…well our kind are the hardest to parent. No thanks.” At that moment the perfect pale man cub, grabbed one of my fingers in her little fist. I felt a shock and then warmth dropped in like rain in my soul. She sucked on my finger. I hadn’t washed that morning but I really didn’t care. I just let her suck all she wanted. I felt the blood at the tip of my finger swirl with life. I smiled. She cried out again. I tickled her, she giggled and then I saw them. Eyes so blue, they made the skies strangers to the colour they owned. In the midst of the white around us, her eyes stood out and my heart just melted. Tears fell out but they never got to my chin, due to the temperature. My eyes hurt but I didn’t care. “Hey Blue!” I said as though greeting a friend I had just seen after many years. She was not mine. We did not share blood but I felt a connection with her, stronger than a thousand copper wires to a light bulb. I did not care for a reason to make her mine. For from the moment I saw those blue eyes I knew love and in that instant on my winter blue she became the words I repeated until I got to the cabin “My Baby, Blue.”