Blue

 Contains themes of serious illness.

I pressed the pause button, an unconscious act, as before, and she stopped. It was an almost comic moment as she stood, just about balanced, her knees bent as she began to drop back onto her old chair. This was how it could be forever.

I’d discovered the pause button the day that we met. She was about to sit at a table across the room from where I was sat enjoying my tea and Victoria sponge, tucked away in my usual corner of the Blue Stripe Café. I hadn’t seen her come in and the first thing that caught my eye was the bright yellow of her blouse. The next was the oh so sharp blue of her eyes. That was when I hit pause. Naturally I had no idea what I’d done, the confusion on my face would surely have been clear to anyone who, at that singular moment in time, was capable of seeing it. Except that no-one was. I half stood, shocked by, as much as anything, the sudden silence. The chatter had stopped, no cups clattered, no knives hit plates as they sliced through sponge, flan or pie. I stopped too at that point, knees ridiculously half bent, thighs touching the table, mouth hanging open exposing my half chewed forkful of cake. I swallowed, and that was my moment of realisation. The world hadn’t stopped. The world had stopped apart from me. It occurred to me that panic was about to replace confusion. I took a deep, deliberate breath, then another. I looked more carefully around the room. Hands half raised to mouths, mouths half open in mid-speech, speech…absent. Sound was absent. No birds singing in the tree just outside, no traffic noise, no anything. In the midst of this ludicrous situation, with realisation just showing the faintest glimmer of poking it’s head above the horizon, my eyes returned to front and centre. To her.

She was beautiful, yet I couldn’t have told you anything about her beyond those eyes. These weren’t blue eyes to lose yourself in, they were blue eyes that knocked you to the floor and pinned you there until you accepted complete and utter defeat, accepted that this was the only woman I could ever want from this moment forward. I knew this was it. I’m ready, I thought. And then she moved. 

I think only two or three people in the whole place looked round to see what was going on with the man who was randomly standing up and staring across the café. She just happened to be one of them. As she turned her gaze on me, understandably, perhaps, wanting to know why I had abandoned my perfectly good cake in order to stand and stare at her. “Your eyes”, was all I could manage in response to the unspoken question. She smiled and I was lost all over again. She overcame this for me, picking up the cup and saucer she had only just put down, and the conversation that ensued lasted for slightly longer than my lunch break allowed for, much longer in fact. The next day, my explanations at the office as to why I hadn’t been back at my desk at any point since stepping out for a quick bite to eat the previous day were inadequate in the extreme. I’ve never been a good liar, and the truth really didn’t seem like a good idea. But it didn’t matter, not much about my life as it had been up to that point really did seem to matter anymore. I’d taken a step into the rest of my life. The before her was done. The with her had begun.

It only happened once after that, until today that is. We’d been together for a little over two years when I asked her to marry me. A proposal really hadn’t occurred to me, to either of us I don’t think, until I came out with the words. The previous two years had travelled by pretty quickly. We went on dates for about three months before we said our first “I love you”, then it was three more before we moved in together, her flat not really big enough but it didn’t seem to matter. It was a full three years later that we bought the house together. Work had gone well for both of us, promotions, pay rises, we were both well regarded, but I was the real rising star. The house was too big, much too big, stretching us to the limit of our finances, more than I’d been totally happy with. There’d been a lot of discussion but ultimately there was only ever going to be one answer. I’d never been able to say no to her. It was the house our children would grow up in, she’d said, her smile so wide and joyous and I knew another decision was made, this time with no discussion at all. Less than a year later she told me the good news, she was pregnant. That’s when it happened. Whatever it is inside me that can put everything, everything, on hold, happened again. I was overwhelmed. Things had gone so fast and just had no idea what I was feeling. There she was, waiting for me to smile, jump up and hug her, start the whole baby name debate that ended up taking up so much of our free time over the next few months. Instead, I sat there, looking at her beaming smile, the hand placed lightly, and I thought, so stereotypically, on her stomach. Then I cried. I couldn’t do this. Work had become almost impossible. Longer and longer hours, people being laid off, the constant pressure to prove that I was the one that could squeeze just a little bit more from the team to make sure that I wasn’t the next to go. We were just affording the house, the bills, food. How on earth would we manage a baby as well? We couldn’t, I knew it and she had to know it too. I looked up again and swept a hand across my face. Then I looked her right in the eye, those eyes, and I knew that we could do it, that we would do it, and that it would be the most right, perfect, wonderful thing that we’d ever done. I’m ready. Then her hand reached out to me and I took hold of it as I stood. “Your eyes”, I said, as the tears started again to roll from mine.

And now she stood, in this almost comic moment, knees bent, beginning the motion of dropping into her chair. The phone still in her hand.

She’d first found the lump more than a year before. After the initial panic and the life redefining stress of the first hospital appointments and test results, the outlook had been positive. We’d caught it early and treatment had begun almost straight away. Things were looking good, as much as was possible given the nightmare world we’d suddenly found ourselves part of, and we were sure there’d be a future that it looked for a moment was lost. Telling the kids was hard, maybe the hardest. They’d both taken it calmly enough, though they both shared tears with us over the next few months. Their job was probably the really tough one, trying to explain her hair loss to their own children. The tears of grandchildren, I’ve learned, are worse than any other kind. It was four months in when things began to go not quite so well. The surgery followed quickly, though not quickly enough to prevent another surgery just a few weeks later, the follow up treatment, the next set of scans. Then we waited. Until today. 

She’d taken the call very calmly, calmly enough that I began to think, to hope, that the news was good. She said goodbye, looked at me, still totally calm, and spoke. 

“There’s nothing else they can do”. 

She closed her eyes and began to sit down. 

It could be this way forever.

And now, even when I close my own, I can’t see her eyes.