The sun is red while my eyelids are closed. I feel the warmth. Warmth of the star. Warmth of my thoughts as the daydream takes them away. Back to my childhood, running on a soccer field with friends. Some I’m still close with. Others I’m not. We wear the blue side of a reversible jersey. The opposing team wears red. I don’t recognize their faces. The faces are blurred smudges. The opposing team doesn’t matter, but they wear red.
Red like the fallen leaves that collect on the sidewalk as I walk to school. The autumn air crisp and delicious in the morning. I didn’t care for school much, but I enjoyed the walk to and from. I’d carefully choose my footing, doing what I could to stomp down on the shed leaves. The satisfying crunch and my shoes scuffing along pavement a soundtrack to my mornings before meeting up with friends taking the same route to school. The orange and gold and red leaves didn’t matter as much once my friends joined me. I wonder if they crunched their own leaves before our paths intersected.
Eventually, the red leaves would fade with rain, turning to a murky sludge. A reminder that even beauty dies. A thought I didn’t have as a child, but one always around the corner as an adult. Death first hit as an early teen when my childhood dog died. A black lab and chow mix with a white chin and paws. The sting returned with a stronger, venomous bite, when my second dog, the dog that accompanied me to college and through early adulthood, died. A Jack Russell and beagle mix. I have a clay molding of his paw print. It sits on a bookshelf next to his red collar. He was there for my divorce and the death of my father. His red collar absorbed as much of my tears as it did hair and dirt. My dad loved to watch the little dog. His red beard jostled as he laughed at the dog’s zoomies, sudden bursts of energy that carried him from one wall to the next. There was no stopping either the running or the laughing.
It’s hard to picture my dad and his red beard now. I can’t just stop and think and draw him inside my brain. I have to picture moments. Events my mind decided to catalog. Only then can I see the bald head and forest green sweater and red beard and massive smile.
Warmth fades from my face. The red gone from my eyelids. A cloud has passed between myself and the sun. I’m still awake. I’m still here. But it’s nice to remember the red of youth, the red of loss, and the red of life. I guess everything in life is either coming or has passed. So much of it has passed. I should go inside, but think I’ll wait for the cloud to shift, and for the red of closed eyelids to return.