2SAME SKY
"Now, Maya, what's your favorite color?"
"Blue," you reply.
"There are so many different shades of blue. Could you be more specific?" The teacher's eyes are smiling.
You tug on her soft, worn sleeve and bring her closer to the window.
"It's that blue." You point at the light pastel enveloping the horizon.
You meet her on the first day of kindergarten and notice her short, fuzzy haircut and how she, like you, skirts around the other children and hides timidly behind her mother's back. Being naïve, tiny five year olds, you feed off your mothers' enthusiasm to pull the both of you together. Eventually, as primary school progresses in a blur of crayon drawings and show-n'-tell, the two of you grow closer.
Every friendship starts small, small as the tentative smiles exchanged during class time, small as the juiceboxes passed between delicate hands during recess. It all changes when both her parents and yours decide to send you to Chinese afterschool classes.
"It's your heritage," your mother says when you pout. "You are too American already. You must improve your Chinese."
The struggle of surviving through the day together, of having nobody else to turn to, forges a friendship like no other. You complain with her about the dampness of the dim, musty room you are cooped up in on weekday afternoons.
"It's so gross in here," you whisper.
"You can't even see the outside," she mutters indignantly.
So being the more courageous one, she darts over to the far side of the room and cracks open the largest window, letting the sun spill across the Chinese worksheets that may as well be gibberish. If you press your face close enough you can smell the air outside.
There are days when you catch glimpses of the hastily scratched ballpoint-pen doodles decorating her notebooks. Somewhere along the way they become beautiful, bright paintings, glaring at you from intimidating canvases. You wonder when she shed her ugly-duckling skin and grew into a long-necked swan.
You're still doodling in notebooks.
There is a day the clouds spill across the sky like milk. In a quiet playground, you both sit and sway gently on the swings, the tanbark floors grazing your clean white sneakers. You can't remember what you talked about, but you do remember both staring into the sun, into the vast, endless blue. It is the first time in weeks you have been alone together. This is okay, you think. This is forever.
It happens on a Tuesday at school. You sit at your lunch table, the one that has belonged to the two of you for years, waiting for her to arrive.
You see her entering the cafeteria. She is laughing, her cheeks pink and eyes twinkling. There is another girl on her arm. She brings the new girl to your table and introduces her to you. Her name is Emma; she is tall and likes to play soccer and has more in common with your best friend than you ever did.
Where did the days go, when without a word, with a single glance, you could secure each other as best friends forever, as immovable and indestructible as mountains?
When you receive the news that you are moving to China, you go through two boxes of tissues. The next day, with red-rimmed eyes and a sore throat, you deliver the news. You promise yourself you will not cry. She gives you a blank stare.
"At least we'll still be under the same sky," you say.
"That's so cheesy, Maya."
"Whatever."
It doesn't really hit you until you walk into your room, and like a new sheet of paper, it is empty. Blank. In the corner sits the stupid cardboard boxes, in which your mundane eleven-year-old life is shut tight, ready to be carted across the world.
Forever a perfectionist, it is a game for you to cross out the "last's" on an imaginary checklist. Last time stepping out the front door. Last time pulling out of the driveway. Last time watching the street race past, the scenery picking up pace, faster and faster and gone. The sky is a stain on a blackboard. On the last day, the all-too-familiar blue has dulled to a shapeless blob of grey.
Maybe it is just sad to see the car go.
When you arrive in China, the very first thing you do is to send her an email. Then two more. Upon receiving no notifications, you cry yourself to sleep. You cannot breath, crushed under the crippling fear that she did not receive them, or worse, that she did.
On an icy February morning, you send her another email.
On Sun, Feb 25, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Maya thecapitalparadise wrote:
I miss you.
There is no reply.
A CNN broadcast announces that Beijing's pollution will be higher than ever this winter. You are not as little as you once seemed.
Yet with stars in your eyes, you have never given up on California. Hung against the backdrop of gray that billows outside your window is a mosaic of carefully cut pictures. All of them blue skies from the somewhere-you-used-to-know.
One week later, you read her first reply. She does not answer any of the eight questions you asked her. Instead, she says something vague, condensed in two sentences about church camp in the summer and not being home when you visit. It is summed up with a cute emoticon. A crisscrossed double knot forms in your throat. Maybe she just doesn't want to see you.
She has always been the distant type. She is not a touchy-feely kind of girl. Even in the early days, she rarely ever called you her "best friend", but that's what you assumed you were to her. You know that she was your best friend. You were proud of it, too: she was smart, pretty, funny, and once she set her mind on something, she never let the idea go. Maybe that is why you were so surprised when she let you go.
It's a guilty pleasure of yours to scroll through your old friends' social networking profiles. To see these strangers standing so close to your best friend, draped around her neck like eye-catching jewelry, tugs at you in ways you can't describe. Who are they? Why does she never tell you about them? She lives under an old sky with new memories and new friends.
To will yourself not to cry, you have gained the habit of tilting your head to the sky. It is what she used to do. She would lean her head back, as if to catch nonexistent raindrops in her mouth. To count the stars, she said. But there are no more stars in the city; you think that perhaps they are just lost in the smog of Beijing. One day, they will find their way home.
On a Tuesday, for a fleeting minute, you forget her middle name. Vivian. You panic and melt the name on your tongue until it becomes nothing.
You login to your email account and find her little icon shining green on your computer and seize the chance to strike up a conversation. It's been months since your last real talk. (you're too busy. so is she)
You ask her about California, and mention that in three months you'll be visiting your old hometown. Her hometown. Before you can stop yourself, you begin to reminisce about old times. You are a child again, and you cannot stop blubbering on and on about things dead and gone.
It's a one-sided conversation, punctuated only by her occasional "oh", and she soon changes the subject to talk about the weather outside. It rained yesterday. The only thing, the only thing she seems to care about is the fact that the sky turned grey in the middle of March and began to weep. Not the girl that used to be her best friend. She can't see that on the other side of the screen the quiet, tiptoeing tears have slid their way down your cheeks. Staring outside the window won't help now. There are no stars to count. You have to go, you tell her. You have class.
With your eyes on the choked Beijing sky, you begin to miss the azure blue of California more than you miss your best friend.
When you are back in California for the summer, the skies glow brighter than ever. The fact that a blue sky is more common than a gray one seems alien. And the color is the thing that strikes you hardest. It's the same sky you stared into as a small child and the same sky you crinkled your nose at only weeks before.
It's always been the same sky, you realize, and in that moment your vision is clearer than it has been for years. All that ever changes is the color.
Three days later, when visiting your oldest friend, she doesn't spare a passing glance at the cotton-candy clouds strewn against brilliant blue. You pause and whip out your phone.
"Maya, why are you stopping?"
"To take a picture."
"Maya, it's been a year since you've been here. Try to live in the moment instead of taking a picture of the damn sky."