Noisy Colours

Chapter 6: Surface of the water

"We took her to the hospital where the doctors gave her the medicine to regain her vision in the period of a few days. I still remember how during the last days, she could see only with one eye and Bagdan would make fun of her by calling her a pirate." She finished the chapter, walking past all the people in the street, while she walked arm in arm with her daughter.

"And that's when she was diagnosed first with the disease?" She was looking right into her mother's face, with eyebrows raised from a mix of the emotions of concern and fear.

"What? Of course not! They told the doctors to work only on the eyes, and so they did. Because no one even though at that time that her vision loss, even if temporary, were just the first signs of something serious, or at least to be concerned about." Just, as usual, she found no problem or difficulty in speaking about those events, but from some of her little actions, it was obvious that she wasn't apathetic about the situation at all.

"But now Naima doesn't have any problems seeing, right?" The daughter asked, just to make sure.

"No, technically now she's supposed to have them only with old age."

"At least that." The daughter finally looked away from her mother's face. She knew that Naima was still alive and most importantly totally fine, but she did not expect to receive this kind of background story about her relatives.

"Oh, trust me, she has many other things to worry about." She pronounced the sentence without even looking once in one direction for more than two seconds.

"But what happened after that she regained her ability to see?"

"Well," She let out a big sigh. "She kissed her perfect days goodbye."

✺

Naima became a totally different person, she started cutting her hair again, she locked herself in the bedroom, skipped the Friday family dinners, and whenever I would have the opportunity to look her in the eyes once again, I noticed that her eyes didn't look like two blue sapphires that you would find in the most beautiful caves anymore, instead, they looked as hard and heavy as big stones that are forced to be under the salty waters of the sea, and have all the people watch them only from the surface, and not everyone could go as down as those dark blue stones did. The real question was: what exactly are those waters and why are they salty? And I think that I wasn't the only one who was searching for an answer. Only Naima had a definitive and sure explanation of everything that was going on, but since she didn't share them with anyone, what I thought was happening was the fact that the stones were forced to go under the sea, adding more layers of water each time, but the one that created the source of the salt was no one but Naima herself. The number of layers puts so much pressure on her, she created something that she thought would help, but from what I have seen, it only made it even harder for her to live in the water. It was too hard to breathe now.

The saddest thing for me personally, was the fact that, in all of that context, I was located on the surface, on a boat, moving further from the dark blue rocks with each new layer of water added by someone or something else. I tried to get closer, but it was too dense for me to even move now. And all I could do was watch, and observe those hard and heavy rocks with the blurry vision, from the surface.

But the worst thing that was obvious for everyone else too, and not only to my vision, was the fact that judging by the way she was acting, she was avoiding me and my presence close to her. It seemed like she was spending her time at school with her two girl best friends even more than she was before the happy times that we had. And now everyone is asking me about her, while I'm still trying to figure out the answer myself. Each time I just say that "she has some important business with those girls" or that "we fought over a pretty shirt and don't want to talk to each other now". Even if I tried to, I tried going up to her and tried to start at least a normal conversation. But all that I got as answers were very short replies, and sometimes not even full words but sounds of confirmation that she did only to let me know that she was listening.