Baby Blue

by Anonymous

Count down from ten, the doctor said, as my body warmed and went nowhere. I woke up crying and someone was saying my name. He had a blue mask. A few cells evacuated, he said. It was a success. Your baby blue has returned to the ocean or the sky, your pick. All hues flood in. Indigo blankets, the azure gown, bulging blue veins. I blacked out and threw up. Psychologists say blue soothes. That’s why they put it in these spaces. But blue is somewhere else doing something more challenging than that. I turned my cheek on her that day and closed my eyes.

I had just arrived in San Sebastian, Spain. I understood everything through color. I only knew my name. They all said it lots of times as I sat there silent, returning to my mind in a white space next to an ocean. I was emptied, the nurses left, the doctor put his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t know my language. He looked at me and walked out the door. This is the life of a woman. This is mine to carry.

I found lots of seashells. They jumped from the ocean into my hands, lined all the walkways, etched every building. I put them in jars as validation in my direction. My path was covered in pieces. Remnants, I thought. Gifts maybe. Relics of forgiveness. A new language.

 I followed the sea shells for 21 days on the Camino de Santiago with a twenty-pound backpack and pocket knife from Portugal. I had a conversation with my foot, cried with butterflies on my knees, punched my pack (day 6), figured out a thousand different ways to coordinate the syllables of “ensalada” with my footsteps. I chanted with a monk and cried in pilgrim’s arms. I held a lot of pilgrims in my arms. I heard Who Let the Dogs Out in the leaves and pouring rain while I made crosses out of blistery bandaids. I dropped two stones at the Cruz de Ferro. I fell a little bit in love.

 Following the shells lead the way to St. James’s bones. I found all mine on the way. Sometimes I smiled at them. Other times I peeled them from my skin and burned them or spit on them and kept walking. I lost weight.

 “Don’t go through more than you have to,” Sarah says. Don’t personalize the cells in your uterus, do not gender them, your baby is not blue. She is only blue. She sucked it out of every landscape, pulled it into my belly, pushed it out of my eyes. If she was anything, she was blue. 

 I cannot say many absolutely true things. But I can say that my mother died when I was eleven and since then certain things hold hues. I do not want to condense my mother into a sentence. She is many. But I do not try to understand her because the things I think become real, and she is the last thing I want to concoct.

 But I do it sometimes. I see her twirling between the butterflies that she promised would find me after she died. Hear her voice on New Year’s Eve saying,

 Count down from ten,

as I’m shouting 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 to the day she went back to the ocean or the sky, her pick. I see her placing shells behind my feet like footprints.

 If I’ve lost my mother and my baby, then I am living the in between.

 Lips and fingernails turn blue just after we die. It comes through as the body stays and the soul becomes. Blue crept in on me the same in Spain. I was still. She came to me and I became. In effort, I keep her around. I follow the pieces. I live between.