Change

I remember she smelled like one of those scented stickers. Grape. Sweet and reminiscent of a favorite childhood candy. I told her this once, and she blushed a perfect rouge. We would sit in the branches of this massive oak tree behind her house and watch the leaves change from green to yellow to red and finally to purple as the sun died beyond the horizon. The boughs of the tree were as thick as steel beams, and she would tiptoe across them with images of Cirque du Soleil on her lips. I can’t recall what color her hair was. It sounds terrible, but these days I remember her only by her voice and her scent.

In my memories I see her backlit by a radiant sun, pumping her legs back and forth on a wooden swing. I see her black and gray, sometimes blue, silhouette in the darkness, beneath me. I hear her voice, hot in my ears, speaking the sweetest, punctuated moans. Neither can I remember the color of her eyes. Their shape was of the roundest plum; her pupils held the brightest star. But the color…

They were not blue like the polka dotted dress she wore to our picnics; nor were they brown like the tiny mole on the inside of her right thigh. Could they have been green like the tight bodice she wore the first night we made love? Or gray like the tennis shoes she threw at me the last time I saw her? Maybe they had flecks of orange in them like our cat, were golden like the ring I gave her, shone like the silver of her moving truck. Maybe they would have been the color of my daughter’s eyes. Maybe they had changed over the years.