Into the Blue

For as long as she could remember, Melinda Robins had lived with her eyes towards the skies. Ever since she was a little girl, she had fallen in love with the sight of it, the vast, endless blue capturing her attention. Day or night, it made no difference to her. The puffy clouds and cerulean sky of the daytime enchanted her just as much as the darkened, starry night did. From sunrise to sundown, she would spend hours watching the sky, her head tilted up towards the blue midst above her. When her fascination with it went beyond words, she picked up a paintbrush. She fell even further in love with the sky and all its colors when she began to paint. At first light, she bounded out the front door with binoculars, sketchpad, and watercolors piled in her arms, her mother’s voice shouting after her for running in the house distantly behind her. Once she reached the outside, she took up her usual post - a short tree stump in her backyard. 

She stared up for hours, watching the clouds move across the sky and painting what she saw. The beauty of the sky drew her in, and she eagerly got lost in its changing shades until the bruising grip of her mother as she dragged her into the house brought her crashing back down to earth.

As much as she loved the night, she dreaded what came with it. Inevitably, she would lose track of time and miss curfew, and inevitably, her mother would come outside searching for her. Once inside, she would sit through the same series of slurred scoldings and reprimands about not coming in the house on time, her mother’s breath stinking of alcohol as it fanned across her face. The lectures usually tapered off into drunken ramblings, ending with Melinda being dismissed to her room. In bed, she’d squeeze her eyes shut tightly until stars danced behind her eyelids, and she’d dream of the skies being her home instead. 

When she was sixteen, her longing only grew. She had become aware of a burgeoning loneliness that she could neither name nor shake. At school, she felt like an outsider. As her peers occupied themselves with crushes and parties, she shrank away from the usual trivialities of teenage life. Her lack of interest only isolated her further. Even at home, the loneliness continued. Her mother spent most nights out of the house, leaving before dark and returning home just before sunrise, staggering through the door before collapsing at the kitchen table. Some nights she wouldn’t return at all, leaving a tinfoil covered plate, or a wad of cash to order dinner with on the counter for Melinda to find after school. Her only respite became the night sky. Under the cover of dark, she’d climb out of her window and onto the roof, where she’d find solace in the stars. They never judged her, or made her feel lonely. The sky was her muse, an old friend that she returned to time and time again. 

She continued to paint the sky, just as she had as a young girl. By the low light of an old lantern that she’d found in the garden shed out back, she filled page after page with brushstrokes in deep hued midnight blues and purples, speckling them with white for the stars. Her room became covered in paintings, her dedication littering the walls from top to bottom in varying shades of blue. When her house didn’t feel like home, the paintings on the wall soothed her like nothing else. 

Eventually, she had gotten used to being home alone most days. Days would pass without her mother coming home, or even calling. The bills piled up, and the cabinets grew emptier, so she did what she needed to do, getting a job waiting tables at a nearby diner after school. She fell into a routine, attending classes by day and attending to customers in the evening. By nightfall, she’d return home, falling into bed exhausted. 

On the rare occasions that her mother did come home, they hardly spoke to each other. The silence between them, too, became routine, with Melinda walking past the drunken woman asleep at the kitchen table on her way to work. As her mother fell deeper into the bottle, Melinda found comfort in the blue, as she always did. What little energy she did have at the end of the day, she spent sitting by the window, whispering to the sky her dreams of escaping into the clouds. She often fell asleep at the window, head leaning against the windowsill, and her tubes of paint and papers still scattered across her lap. 

But tonight was different. As she sat by the window, her focus on her painting was broken by the sound of the back door slamming open, then shut. Her mother had come home. She glanced over at the clock on her nightstand. It was only 10 P.M. Usually her mother would still be out by now. She listened as her mother trudged up the stairs, her heavy footsteps growing louder as she got closer to the top. Instead of going to her room at the end of the hall like she always did, she stopped at Melinda’s door, clumsily fiddling with the knob before she finally managed to open it. Melinda smelled the sharp sting of alcohol wafting off of her mother before she saw her standing there, leaning against the door frame. On wobbling legs, she stumbled into the room, scanning the walls before her eyes landed on her daughter, sitting on the floor. 

“You’re always here,” she slurred. “Shouldn’t you be out at a party, or hanging out with your friends, or something?”

“I didn’t want to.” Melinda said quietly before returning her attention to the painting on her lap. 

Her mother flicked one of the paintings on the wall. 

“You think this is going to make you something?” she sneered, her voice dripping with venom. “Painting the sky all day long, pretending to be some sort of artist in here? I can’t believe I raised you to be so boring. Bring a boy home or something, for crying out loud. Be like everyone else, instead of sitting in here.”

Melinda’s grip on her paintbrush tightened. She stayed silent as tears pricked the corners of her eyes. She knew the alcohol could make her mother cruel, but never like this. After a few more moments of silence, her mother left, stumbling off towards her own room, where her continued grumbles eventually turned to soft snoring. Melinda sat in the silence, her mother’s words digging deeper into her as they echoed in her mind. She looked out the window, then down at the painting on her lap. For the first time ever, they gave her no solace. 

A week later, she brought home a boy from her class named Jonah. He was nice enough, with chestnut hair and deep azure eyes. He made her feel normal, even if she didn’t feel strongly about him, and that was enough for her.  When she left home with him two years later, her mother had laughed in her face. 

“Go ahead, see if you can make something of yourself out there!” she’d shouted from the porch. “You’ll come right back here in a few years, see how far you get with those stupid paintings!”

As Jonah’s truck backed out of the driveway of Melinda’s childhood home, she rested her head against the passenger window. She watched as the setting sun began to disappear behind the fluffy, blue tinted clouds, and hoped that she would prove her mother wrong. She had to. 

Within a few years, Melinda Robins had become Melinda Hardy. She and Jonah married quickly once they were in the city. She had grown to resent living in the city, with its constant noise droning like the buzzing of a fly. Her disdain for it was at its strongest at night, hating how the amber glow of the streetlights bled into the inky, sapphire sky and drowned out the stars.  

Still, she swallowed it down as she tried to make do. Jonah got a job as an engineer, and she began working as a clerk. She fell into a routine with Jonah: work, eat, sleep, and on weekends, they went out together. He was a suitable husband, and even if he didn’t make her happy, she was comfortable at his side. She could nod at his jokes, offer him a practiced smile, but her mind was always elsewhere. As he talked about work, and coworkers, the words would go past her. He was so normal, so content, and it only deepened the disconnect she felt. She got used to feeling like she was holding her breath, of something stifled beneath her ribs that longed to get out. 

By the time she was twenty-five, she was pregnant. Life had moved fast after that, each milestone passing her by as time slipped through her fingers. Through promotions, bonuses, moving houses, diapers, and the mundanity of adulthood, Melinda took it all as it came. It was painfully boring, but it was stable, and she told herself that that’s what mattered most. Her paintings and art supplies collected dust, sitting untouched in their boxes. As her responsibilities grew, so did the distance between her and the sky that she so loved.  She still dreamt of soaring through that boundless blue midst, being embraced by it as she left behind a world that didn’t understand her. But eventually, those dreams became infrequent, becoming buried under the suffocating weight of domesticity. 

Decades passed her by in a blur, and Melinda hardly felt the anchoring weight of the constraints of her routine anymore. Their son had grown up and left home to forge a path of his own. When Jonah passed, it shook her to the core. She grieved his death, and the life they had built together, but what shook her even more was the inescapable realization that she was all that remained of a life she hadn’t even wanted. The house that they had lived in together was now too still, too empty. It was in that silence that she could finally hear the faint echo of something she thought was buried long ago. In the quiet, she had space to think, to remember what was and what could still be. She found her art supplies tucked away in the attic, in the same worn cardboard box that she packed them in the day she left home. As she gingerly unwrapped the tubes of paint and brushes, she felt younger than she had in years. Her wrinkled hands trembled as she set up a makeshift easel by the window in the low light of dusk, unsure if she could capture the same beauty she saw in the royal blue and indigo hues of the sky. When the first brushstroke hit the paper, it all clicked into place. She knew she hadn’t forgotten a thing. She painted the sky as she remembered it - vast, endless, and free. 

For the first time in decades, she painted with reckless abandon. The weight that sat heavy on her chest for all those years had finally been lifted. With each brush stroke, the quiet, suffocating life she had lived had begun to slip away, replaced by vibrant color once more. She painted the sky daily, with each completed piece feeling like a part of her soul resurfacing. She played with different styles, letting inspiration guide her hand as she reconnected with her muse. The peace she had so longed for was finally here, and she felt no need for anything besides it. 

On a calm summer evening as the sun hang heavy in the sky, Melinda gathered her paints and brushes, a canvas, and her favorite shawl, a quiet determination in her steps. Outside, the evening air was cool and fresh, the colors of the world softening as day turned to night. She set up her easel in the grass, her fingers curling around the paintbrush as she began to paint her final masterpiece. In the stillness of twilight, she was serene. She painted by the light of the fireflies as they buzzed around the canvas, glowing like little stars in the surrounding darkness. When she finished, she smiled softly as she gazed upon her work. Setting her brush down on the easel, she closed her eyes, feeling her body relax against the warm grass beneath her. 

As the first light of morning broke, she was nowhere to be found. Her son, on a surprise visit, searched through the house, looking for her, to no avail. Her bed was empty, and he saw no sign of her until he looked out at the yard through the sliding glass door. Right in the grass, where she had left them, sat her shawl, her art supplies, and her painting, but no Melinda. He walked outside to the abandoned spot in the yard, looking closer, when he found a handwritten note sitting on the easel next to her brush. Though the morning dew had lightly smudged the ink, he knew it was his mother’s handwriting. 

Finally flying, find me up in the blue.