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12/1/16
THE STRONG WIND kisses my face and tangles my hair as the crisp air curls around my warm body. The grass tickles the skin of my bare thighs as my fingers play with the pebbles that fill the solid ground around me.
My eyes watch a man with similar green eyes walk closer. Though his are darker, almost black, and wiser and older. But if one looks closely they can see the same shade of jungle green that hides beneath the darkness. Like a wild amazon at night.
"Here," he says as a smile blooms across his face. He tosses a worn out book at me out of nowhere that I instinctively catch between my small hands. I run my soft fingers over the worn out spine of the book.
"What is this?" I ask as I can barely see the title because the paperback cover has been bent to hell and back. A book that has been read so thorough it's been worshiped.
"A book," he jokes sarcastically. He lowers his body next to mine though he is twice as tall as my small teenage body.
I huff with a roll of my eyes. "I got that," I state dryly. "What I mean is what book is it?" I clarify.
"The Giver," he tells me. "Your mother gave it to me years ago. Before it was even published."
"When she worked at that publishing agency?" I ask as my fingers begin to thumb through the yellowing pages.
"Exactly," my father acknowledges. I grew up in a family whose love for reading rivaled a love for anything in this whole world, besides one another. Books shaped our lives in every way. What we speak about, what we learn, what we watch all centers around what is first put on paper.
"There are some errors in it as it was a draft, but it's one of my all time favorites," he tells me as I continue to take in the pages that my father so obviously loved.
"Why?" I ask when I finally look up to meet eyes that mirror my own.
"Because the way the main character sees the world changes completely," he tells me. "And that happened to me."
"When?" I question as my eyes narrow.
He faces forward so that the wind breathes against his pale skin, and pushes his blondish hair back. "When I first saw your mother," he answers. "It was like I was seeing color for the first time," he adds a few seconds after.
I didn't understand his words until I read the book for the first time the next night. Then I read it the next night as well, and for a month it was the only book I read and held onto like lifeline as my entire world fell apart around me.
My eyes groggily open as one of the last happy memories I have with my father begins to slip away. My pulse is racing and my throat feels clogged as I try and push away the emotions that attempt to fill my every waking breath. The emotions I push away and never speak of because I fear they may overrun my life and my heart.
