Madura Muraleetharan (11) – STAFF REPORTER
It’s a wonder her eyes are brown when she has lived her entire life in blues. It blurs the corners of her vision and maybe that’s why she wears glasses. Those are pink though. It’s there in the smudged corners of her memory, the colour of her sister’s snot streaked shirt when she would sniff into it. The words flying out of her parents’ mouths would be blazing and red, but she only remembers the cerulean-soaked tune of her sister’s shakey lullabies in her ear. Now, with work-worn eyes, her parents always smile at each other, and her sister lives miles away in a cramped dorm and never texts.
It’s the cyan mosaic of the eastern tide that used to nibble at her feet while she made sure to not let her ice cream drip down her tissue-feathered hands. The same colour that her notes danced upon while her knees trembled with stage-fright. That was before she moved away and found out her music teacher was dead. She doesn’t sing anymore. When she does, her voice is almost transparent.
It’s the colour of that early December night when she shook so uncontrollably she thought she might shatter. It was 10 pm- or was it 11? She was a baby, not even sixteen. The sky was a melting stretch of iris and indigo, cracked with the frost brushed tree branches. She had looked outside and tried to push away the inky emptiness that was boring its way through her ribs. She couldn’t even cry, she was shaking so hard. That night she had watched the navy shadows dance on her walls until they dissolved with the touch of the first rays of dawn. She holds her head high now and only ever shakes with the sweetest anticipation. She still doesn’t cry.
It is what swells in her veins, the force that keeps her eyes shifting and her legs moving. It is the electricity that keeps her grounded and the wing that keeps her mind flighty. She entered the world scarlet and screaming. It would be her all and everything to leave like the final blue hours of the evening which evaporate into the darkness of the night. Whenever she bleeds though, it is red. So she will wait. Meanwhile, she sings a lullaby, and it is almost cerulean.
