December
Sometimes I wonder about Mark’s parents, if I should blame them for what happened. Not his father for abandonment, and not his mother for neglect, but both of them, equally, for the mere genetic timing of his conception. Had they conceived him on a different day, in a different hour, at a different minute, perhaps his eyes would not have been so blue. Perhaps they would have been a murky brown, or a mossy green, and not that gleaming magnetic sapphire.
I fell in love with Mark with a childlike innocence, as if I saw a buoyant red balloon and followed it, grasping for the string, farther and farther beyond home, until at last I held it in my hand a moment before I plummeted into the depths of a neighbor’s backyard swimming pool. And even as I thrashed and choked, I held on to that balloon, believing it would lift me out of the water and into the sky, into the promise of the horizon.
At what point was there no turning back? Was it when he first touched me, the electric sensation of his skin on my skin? Or when we first kissed, the smell of his breath that lingered long after we embraced?
No. No.
It was earlier, the first time I looked into his eyes.
Those blue eyes were the end of me.