Strawberry
It was so berry good I couldn’t stay my straw (or spoon)
It’s finally cold where I live, cold enough to turn on the heater. Most of the people reading this, I think, will be in places where the cold is of a different degree, of a different kind. So though it might be unthinkable to eat the equivalent of ice cream in the middle of a nor'easter, I’m just fine turning my tongue red with a strawberry raspa in the fifty five degree weather.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping recently. I stayed up late one night, slept down the following day, flipped my sleep schedule to the point where I now eat dinner for breakfast. I’m not proud of it.
(Alright. I’m a little proud of it.)
I’ve tried to get back on track, of course. I’ve been in bed at two, three, four a.m., wide awake, listening to the heavy hum of the heater; I’ve closed my eyes, trying desperately to think of nothing, to fall asleep, to get right.
Sometimes, I’ll start counting down from a million. I usually get to around nine hundred ninety-nine thousand seven hundred forty-seven before it’s lights out.
A bomb is going to go off when you get to zero, I say to myself.
You’ll never get to zero, I reply.
Why risk it?
Other times, I’ll go through the multiples of numbers, starting with one and ending at something like twenty-two. But in between calculations — one times one is one, one times two is two, one times three is three — thoughts will begin to seep through — six times seven is forty two, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is forty two, six times eight is forty eight, 1848 the year of revolutions Eric Hobbsbawm the sociological imagination Julia Adams Grace Hopper College furniture, six times nine is fifty four, class of 1954 professor of history, endowments, sterling professor, research funds, inequality, injustice, unfair, what’s fair, fair’s fair, life’s not fair.
No rest for the wicked, I say to myself.
No rest for the wicked.
And the righteous don’t need it.
When I feel like enough is enough, when I need to rest more than I need to ride a train of thought to the end of the line, I try to clear my head of numbers. I try to clear my head of words. And I begin to imagine the scene of my slumber as seen from a ceiling-corner in my room. I can see myself hutched up under the covers, my right side flush up against the mattress, head resting on the edge of a firm pillow. I have my arms wrapped around a soft pillow. I’m imagining it to be someone who I’ll one day love but who I do not yet know.
And in this imaginary state of suspension over my soon-to-be-sleeping form, I can see my breath falling out of my mouth in wispy, neon red coils that meander their way into oblivion. And I think of my sister breathing in the room over, of my mom and dad breathing on the other side of the house, of our two curled-up sleeping dogs breathing their breath back into their own bodies; I can see the puffs and streams and bursts of warm red air coming from their mouths and noses and snouts. Breath, at this time of night, at this time of year, is the color of a strawberry raspa; a strawberry raspa is the color of breath, at this time of year, at this time of night.
In a fiction writing class, we once read a short story by Cynthia Ozick called “The Shawl.” There’s a simile in there I haven’t been able to forget and that now comes to mind: “eyes blue as air,” Ozick has one of her characters say of a baby in the story. I remember the professor pausing on that simile, admiring it.
There’s the Red Badge of Courage, there’s Mao’s Little Red Book and the Red Army, there’s Big Red and Code Red Mountain Dew, there’s Command and Conquer: Red Alert and Command and Conquer: Red Alert II and Command and Conquer: Red Alert III, there’s Red from Orange is the New Black and Red from that Seventies Show, there’s Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, there’s rosacea and malar rash, there’s Florence Welch’s hair in the music video for “Sweet Nothing” by Calvin Harris and Carice van Houten as Melisandre in Game of Thrones, there’s Al’s Toy Barn in Toy Story II, there’s Clifford the Big Red Dog, there’s HIM in the Powerpuff Girls, there’s Mr. Krabs and Larry the Lobster, there’s Prince’s Little Red Corvette and Taylor Swift’s Red, there’s the red carpet, Red Wedding, red planet, there’s The Hunt for Red October and Red Dawn and Red Dragon, there’s Red for Filth, there’s the Red CHI Flat Iron, there’s the Red Sea and Red Rock Canyon, there’s Little Red Riding Hood, there’s Green River, Running Red.
So many blue things, so many red things, but so rarely blue air, so rarely red air.
There was once a barbecue restaurant named Red Barn my family and I used to go to. They had good food: chicken, sausage, brisket, rice and beans, potato salad, sweet tea, you know, barbecue. I remember that there was an informational notice stuck to the door. It warned parents to watch their kids, and showed four panels of children in dangerous situations. I remember two of them. One showed a small child about to jump into a deep pool. Watch your kids or they’ll drown, it wanted to show. The other showed a kid opening the drawer of a bedside table and finding a gun. Watch your kids or they’ll shoot themselves, it wanted to show.
Blood is red. In elementary school I used to argue with this kid about whether blood would be red or blue in space (because there wouldn’t be any oxygen around). Turns out blood is never actually blue.
That same kid once tackled me in the school gym so hard that I skid across the concrete floor, my face running up against unevenly dried patches of paint. I was escorted to the nurse by D.L., who didn’t know what to say to me because I was crying so hard; one side of my face was, to put it simply, fucked up. It had been scraped pretty egregiously.
Strawberry raspa | strawberry flavoring + scraped ice | strawberry flavoring + scraped ice - ice | strawberry flavoring + scraped | strawberry flavoring + scraped - strawberry flavoring | + scraped | scraped + face | scraped face = blood, lots | Adrian’s face in the first grade = scraped face - blood, lots (strawberry flavoring?).
Forgive the math. I don’t practice much besides counting and multiplication.
Red as a sign of good luck: wearing red boxer-briefs when I fly, when I have an interview. Wearing a red shirt to a class that intimidated me, calling upon the color to give me strength. My favorite fountain pen, red, dripping a steady line of blue ink onto the blank pages of a red notebook. A red brita filter. A red metal water bottle.
Red lips, how could I go without talking about them.
I have known one romantic love in my life. I loved her. She loved me.
I won’t say that she had strawberry-red lips or cherry-red lips or rose-red lips. What could I have but visceral disdain for such inadequate language.
What to say except that she wore red lipstick, that her lips were red, that I’m not yet a good enough writer to say what I want to say about the lips that I fell in love with.
She and I were in a high school drama production together. Our friends used to tease us because by the end of the show, my lips would somehow have become the same color as hers.
Red carpet lips: figurative language I don’t hate.
We’re comfortable with each other. We’re on her bed, talking. She says, Let’s put on lipstick.
I laugh, I protest, I give in because I love her, because I’ve worn lipstick before for theatre, because I know, and she knows too, I think, that I want to try on the lipstick. She knows this because she loves me, because we’re comfortable with each other.
She puts it on for me.
My lips are the lips I fell in love with.
What is between us then, in that moment, is a feeling the same color of the breath I exhale when I’m alone in my bed years later, is a feeling sweet and a taste tender, is a refreshing strawberry raspa consumed on a cold Valley day.
