Girls Green and Blue

I always had a friend who was blue, she blue to my green, her eyes indigo blue. She loved inky blue glass and lapis lazuli rings framed in silver. She wore blue scarves and blue sandals and kept blue glass beads in vases, blue crystals hanging from her window tangling with the blue and white Indian bedspread curtains. She wrote in blue ink to my turquoise striped pen that I had used since grade school, the ink that matched my eyes, grey green.

I was always the paler sister to the blue friend, she who was sure of that color, as sure as I was of green but somehow her blue shouted and my green retreated. My green wished to be alone, to watch opaque streams with grey-green silt flowing to the river. We bought glass bead necklaces on wire from the import store and mine were a smoky bottle green that made me think of the depths of hidden ponds in the woods. Hers were a drenched and sinking blue, the dark of the sea, blue as the blood of the bug from the tongue twister. 

My blue friend spent weekends in her third-floor sanctuary at the top of an old colonial house. She was alone except for the one-eared boyfriend. Sometimes they drank a bottle of cough syrup and tripped out on the floor listening to Steppenwolf. These were weekends I could only imagine from my perch by the creek, staring into the green strands of new algae growing in the shallows like green animal hair shed at the water’s edge. Yes, these were the kinds of thoughts if I had any.

I was envious of her blue and daring world, and in college my new blue friend was also daring and attractive to every boy and I watched her toy with them and take them to bed. Since she was doing that I didn’t have to. I could still be the pale green glass friend in a room papered with nature posters, the one with the green glass bottle collection, the one who hunted beach glass and brought her all the deep blue chips, no doubt from bottles of Milk of Magnesia.

I kept the pale green and grey pieces, some even purplish. My mother said that was especially old glass. Back then I loved to go to the flea market and look at all the bottles lined up in the hot sun, so many shades of bleached aqua and green. The darkest ones were called poison green. What did they hold in the old days? That’s what fascinated me about bottles, the past times they came from, the times I longed to revisit when I played “Pioneers” down in the swamp, wearing a long calico dress and hitching it up to step through the tall grass.

I did wonder how the girls of that time could stand to wear long dresses and so many layers underneath in the summer when it was so humid and sticky. Didn’t they want to throw off their long skirts and let their skin be touched by the damp air?  It was heavy as a caressing hand, I loved the feel of it on my cheek. I lay awake at night feeling it press against my body. I didn’t have fantasies about anyone, but more about sensations, of being subsumed into the imagination of someone, of sharing a secret world. This is what excited my mind and body, so when it came to real boys who tried to touch me I was repelled and fled.

Not like my blue friends, the adventurous ones, who went to parties and made out in corners and came to school and showed off their hickeys. All this was so abstract to my green world, a walled garden where I lived with animals who spoke and a wild woods boy who played the flute. I wanted to live closer to nature, that was my deepest desire, and I clung to it with a fierce animal passion and didn’t let anyone else in. I had only this certainty, and a longing for more. Why did I always feel I was falling away from nature, always crawling to get back, how school and cars and stores came in between and I couldn’t make it all hang together. I had to get down to the swamp and restore the connection.

Were these blue friends wanting more from me because they were blue and I was green, dilute, easily won over to the blue side? Easily blotted out even, by the deep blue that consumes, Chartres blue blazing forth in a deafening decibel that puts everything else in the background. Did I let my blue friends run over me, or did I back away after I felt they had taken too much? And what about my sweet robin friend from grade school, the one who was not blue or green, but a fully rounded real girl? Where was she after I went to the other high school? She blended into the woods like another dry leaf, she didn’t stand out. I left her behind. Why did I let her go like that? Why didn’t she ever complain?

I didn’t want to be bound by any social rules, the green world gave me the separation where later I started thinking about loving women. I was curious about this and stayed in that world for 15 years. It felt like a long time then but now seems a mere chapter. There too I had a blue friend, with dark, overcast sky-blue eyes that flashed like heat lightning with storms circling beneath. The whirlpool of depression, I can see now. This lover was blue, maybe that’s what I was waiting for all those years. Finally a blue friend who was my lover, who understood the heart of me. But it turned out I was wrong about this blue girl. She was afraid me. You’ll never be satisfied with me, she said.

This girl’s relationship to nature was strictly practical, and my romantic visions had no place, green and flimsy. I couldn’t stand up to the blue-eyed ferocity of a girl proving to her family that she can run a farm. Who had time for wandering by a stream? Maybe jump in the pond after a day of work, that was about it.

My blue lover left me for another, a tall, intellectual glasses-wearing editor, colorless, except for her black hair. What was the attraction? No matter, it liberated me to become myself, not the follower of one more blue friend whose life had no room for green.

Spring was the time I felt most green, but here on this dry coast the spring girl is gone. The green one, the one who longed to be a Birch Girl or a May Day maiden in green satin slippers, she has no place here. She folded back into the pages of an old field guide like a pressed leaf, bleeding vital fluids onto the page.

I saved one bottle from my collection, a tall pickle jar with arched panels streaked with bubbles, dignified as a cathedral. The aqua glass is the closest note of green to who I imagined I was, a girl of the woods who sang hymns to dead animals. Can I afford to keep such a thing now, just a pretty vessel in a window, never getting dirty, never filling and spilling, never cracking or chipping from love and being used over and over? It holds a tangled vine with dried seed pods from my lost green world thousands of miles from here.

What kind of bottle am I now? Bottled up, or smashed and left on the burn pile? I’m the container of so many green longings, wishing to soar into treetops, the ropy willow, the elm that covered our lawn like a tent. Green and not blue. No, I have never aspired to blue.

Green can always admire blue, but blue can never touch my shimmering pale color, the satin green of Heathcote Brook, the swamp, how my own blood ran, changing with the sky. I was no more than a creek running shallowly over rocks. I didn’t stay anywhere for long in my thoughts, couldn’t focus on anything uncomfortable and stay there. I don’t know how to translate the language of green into something to share with another human being.

Nowhere in all this time did I have the ability to laugh at myself. Today I think of all I didn’t understand then, all the green days I was lonely but had no idea. It’s too late to laugh. Now I know I am empty and scrubbed out like a bottle that has forgotten what it held, if it held anything at all.