The sky was so blue
that it wasn't blue any longer.
The sky ascended our spectrum
and forged its own definition
of blue.
Every time that sky comes back into my mind,
the colors shift
the blue gets blue-er
and the horizon widens.
The ink spot in that new blue sky was my kite
as I raised it higher into the atmosphere.
I felt like I was riding the wind and disappearing into
the new blue distance
but my feet were hard on the ground.
When I was a child,
this was my favorite way
to spend an afternoon.
The last time I flew a kite,
the time when blue wasn't the ocean,
it wasn't a mood,
it wasn't rain clouds,
and it wasn't the sky.
This blue was all of them.
Or maybe I was all of them.
And the sky was just the sky.
My kite was as high a
s the rope would let it go.
My feet were walking on a world
no longer my own.
The last time I flew a kite,
I wasn’t flying a kite.
It's strange how we try to balance
two things that don't equate in any way.
We compensate sadness with food,
longing with drinking,
and absence with anything to pass the empty days.
We make things up to feel better.
The little mnemonic devices that alleviates
whatever ills us.
Like a blue sky.
But my blue sky was real.
It was all over my head.
The last time I flew a kite,
the sky wasn't blue
and the sky wasn't inside me.
Maybe I made it up,
Maybe it was raining.
As my kite rose higher,
I know I saw that blue.
At that moment,
color splashed into my black and white life,
standing in the middle of an open field with
the wind in my face,
I lost myself.
And just for a minute,
I lost your absence.
You were still gone,
You just weren't on my mind.
Finally, I could breathe.
And my mouth didn't have your after taste.
That kite had nothing to do with you.
Which is why it released me.
It was untainted
with my present situation
and it solely possessed my childhood.
That blue wasn't,
The Ocean
A Mood
A Rain Cloud
or the Sky
but it had nothing to do with your death.
It only had to do with me,
at least for a moment.
As my kite rose higher
into that impossible blue,
I thought about
how we never flew
kites together.
---
Lyrics submitted by Shanie Martin.