On Blue Skies, and the Girl I Used to Be
For Jared. On a Texas sky, a last Thanksgiving, and a younger self who still believed in magic.
There are certain days when the sky looks exactly like my childhood. That impossible shade of blue that feels too wide for the world, edged in gold like someone painted light onto the air. When that sky appears, it pulls a thread I didn’t know was still attached.
Suddenly I’m back in Texas for Thanksgiving, the air cold and crisp, the sky bluer than I had ever seen it. All of us gathered on that same stretch of land, cousins running across the yard in jackets that were never warm enough, the kind of holiday where the sun felt sharp and honest on our faces.
That was the last time I saw my cousin Jared.
He was laughing in the yard, alive in the way only someone young and unaware of time can be. None of us knew the farm would become the place we lost him a few years later. On that day it was still just a place where we chased each other through the grass and tried to stay warm.
On blue and gold days like that, I see her.
The younger me.
The girl who saw magic in everything and never thought to question it.
She searched for wonder even when things were heavy. She found beauty in parking lots and back roads and the way the sun hit the tops of buildings she never wanted to leave. She didn’t know yet how grief could hollow a person. She didn’t know that she would have to become many different versions of herself just to keep going.
But she knew magic when she saw it.
Maybe that is why the sky still stops me. It reminds me that magic wasn’t something I outgrew. It was something I misplaced. Something I set down when life insisted on being practical instead of enchanted.
On days like this, I let her back in.
The girl I used to be.
The one who trusted beauty. The one who believed in wonder. The one who thought the world was big enough to hold her.
Maybe she was right.
For Jared, held in the blue and gold light.