The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

July - Safe (Part Five)

            The heat wave lasted for days. Work was still on hold until a storm came or we all stopped sweating as we sat down, but Daniel and a few others tried to do some tending to plants and other small tasks in the early morning or late night. This work was only on a volunteer basis, but most people adjusted their sleep schedule in order to be up at those times and napped all afternoon. Our evening feast became our large lunchtime meal before everyone went their own separate ways when the sun was at its highest point. Jasmine and I had completely eradicated our old morning schedule, too, and now instead of getting up with the sun and powering on with our own tasks, we had our siesta with everyone else, finally drawing the curtains to darken the room. It was eerie seeing a community so rich and full of life like The Bear, fold itself away for a few hours in the middle of the day. Where we had all been digging, carrying, pruning, and lifting, we were all now at rest as the heat moved its thick waves through our houses.

            Jasmine and I usually got up when the stars were out instead and the heat was now a gentle wind. We would get our personal tasks done in the middle of the night (she was still writing "nonsense" and I had taken up reading again instead), and after we began to go on walks together around the grounds. Our time at the community had been a strange and unreal experience for both of us, and now we were beginning to process it. We talked about small things, at first. Our first talk consisted of the meals that I liked and that I wanted to try making again. Nothing was done by recipe here; Kristen seemed to have everything memorized with the right proportions to be able to feed ten or more people. If we were helping her in the kitchen, she would sometimes write out what we needed, but after the meal, the small card was usually gone. If anyone else wanted to contribute a meal idea, it was usually memorized, too. Jasmine had been trying to write them all down again as soon as we got back, but it was difficult. We talked about veganism a lot, this huge deluge of information and emotion coming out of Jasmine that she had never expressed to me before. I found out her favorite foods, why they were her favorites, and more often than not it was a memory associated with them, involving Gerard or myself. She wanted that peach tea she had had with him the first night they had met and really talked to one another. It made her conjure up this image of him that was so contradictory to what he had been in her mind before.

            "What had he been?" I asked her, curious.

            "The cigarettes and coffee guy, smoking and being pretentious, but still somehow managing to maintain a relationship with you. He was cold before, but after meeting him, he had heart. He looked around that small tea shop like it was the most important and beautiful place in the world." She sighed, the memory hurting a bit. "He didn't want pretension. He thought he did a lot of the time, but he mostly wanted beauty. He followed beauty. Sometimes it crossed with pretentious people, but he would try to redeem them. He tried to redeem everything..."

            She trailed off, growing sadder. She clutched her stomach and we didn't talk about Gerard anymore, at least, not like that. It was pulling at the things we had come here to forget about. We tried to recall what we wanted to remember about this place. She told me about Gwen, and how she was so quirky ("though that sounds like I'm being condescending, which I'm not") and would say the strangest things, like why the sky changed colors when the sun set.

            "We had just been sitting there one night, just outside the silo talking about where we had gone to school, and then she looked up at noticed the sunset. She turned to me and was like, 'you know the sky is a huge prism? It's changing color because the light is being reflected at a different side of the spectrum.' At least, I think that's what she said. I was just so surprised, and she was so elated she had found the answer for why something was beautiful. It made me realize that I didn't necessarily need to have that, before."