December 4, 2006

Up there

Up there, she thought, and she patted her hair dry with a towel, the sky must be very cluttered. She remembered back a long time ago, when their house was being built, and her parents had taken her to see it. There was dirt everywhere, instead of a lawn, instead of the street and the house itself still just had its wooden bones, like the houses stopped in time over on the other side of the creek. There was no door yet— only a frame— and they went inside so Carmen could see the room that would be hers, up the wooden steps with muddy footprints. The room wasn’t finished yet, but still Carmen could see its shape and the space where the window would go once there was a wall. Carmen had lay down on the floor in the middle of the room, and looked right up through the roof that wasn’t there yet, and she thought, “So this is what the sky above my bed will look like.” She still thought about that sky sometimes, when she looked at her ceiling in the dark at night. The sky hadn’t looked cluttered then, as evenly blue as the ceiling was white, but then daylight can be tricky. When the night comes along with all its lights, then you can see what’s out there.