Seeing Red [✓]

i. the n word

"Don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to." - TLC (1994)

"Happy birthday, Beautiful," echoed her voice from the door.

Sweet and light like honey and rain, Mom's voice was a building symphony whenever she woke me up, but especially on this day. 

My eyes had yet to open. My blinds had yet to open. My legs had yet to close, but that didn't stop my mother from stepping her way into my room, feet as light as Dad's snoring,  to disrupt my sleep. "It's time to get up and begin a brand new day."

I grunted and threw a pillow over my head. "Is it that time of the year already?" I asked, muffled under the pillow, the sheets, my crushed dreams and goals. Even my mother's delicate tone could not drag me out of the slump that this day brought with it, like mayonnaise on a sandwich. 

"It is," Mom said. "A whole 365 days. Open your eyes and let's see which one it is this year." 

I didn't move. I could hear her tiny feet moving closer, like a car in the driveway or a ship toward an iceberg. The pillow was moved out of my face. "Let's go, Ashley," she said, singing my name in a broken tone. 

"Can you stop calling me Ashley," I barked. I sat up, eyes still squeezed shut, dry palms still covering them like lids on bottles, darkness engulfing everything around me. "It's embarrassing enough that I got teased about it in high school."

"That's your great-grandma name boy," Momma grunted and moved my hands from my eyes slowly. "Open them," she said. "You can't walk around with them shut all day." 

I sighed. Why haven't they invented virtual reality goggles yet? Like, they've got those stupid watches, but glasses that could make me see the world like how i want to? Come on, earth. 

"Open them, or you're going to work hungry," she said.

I groaned. Her cooking was ace and my cooking wasn't cooking, not by the broadest definition of the word.

So, I slowly fluttered my eyes to an open. The first thing I saw was a blurry face, a smile and a whole lot of nothing else. "Well?" Mom asked. 

I looked around my room for something familiar. Maybe something would click. But nothing. 

"Which is it," she asked. "red or blue?"

"Ummm," I mumbled, scanning the room, like I had lost my phone or buried treasure,  for anything that would tell me.

Red or blue? Blue or red? Roja o Azul? Azul o Roja?

Blacks and grays and shades of white met me, greeted me like old high school classmates that picked on me, but the reds and the blues in my room were shy, wall flowers, it seemed. In their hiding places, avoiding attention.