Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly,
And the dreams that you dare too,
Why, oh why can't I?
-Israel Kamakawiwo Ole', Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World
Hair Flying
She sat in the well lit kitchen at three AM after another harrowing dream. One disturbing enough to have her eyes glued open with the grit of exhaustion. She was on a step-stool that put her level with the counter and she leaned against it her gaze locked on the glass mug before her. She watched the magenta liquid slowly coloring her hot water, the teaness of it becoming. The colorful swirls oozing from the paper teabag and mixing with the plainness of the clear water bringing it too life in-between. The curving stripes drifted like someone mixing red into white paint, or the drops of her period in the toilet.
Like the hot and cold bands of the atmosphere her grandfather told her pilots can see in the sky.
"They know what to look for, kido, they see them plainly and can guide these little streamlined planes that look like they are made out of Styrofoam around on them." His eyes glittering in one of the rare moments where none of her family was with them. Just him, just her. Interloper free.
"Find a hot air pocket and let it lift you and push you forward so you can dance on the air, in between the all those pieces of different temperature air." He picked up pieces of her thin child's hair and floated them around explaining the way they would go with each new chunk of air and she felt her scalp tingle with their movement.
It tickled and she wanted to put her arms out and feel the air he was talking about rush around her, blowing against her cheeks lifting her stomach inside her too new places like the rides at the fair did. She laughed and Grandpa smiled and kept lifting her hair.
In the memory he never stopped, never. Kept lifting her ticklish hair for hours, days, years.
She could never remember how, if did come to pass, that he stopped.
As she sat there tears running down her face when the water, which sought such things, was uniformly filled with the magenta color of her fruity tea. The fun over, the memory too wonderful in its moment and too painful in context.
It might have tempered her missing him if she could have remembered the end, distracted her from the peace found in that seemingly endless moment.
She would never remember how her mother swooped in and stole her away from it. Admonishing him.
"Now I'll have to brush her hair, Dad."
"No. I made a mess I'll clean it up, Daughter."
Her mother sighed against her delicate rib cage. "No, I like it," the child called, obstinate, hands going to her head without touching it, protecting it from wherever the brush might be and causing her mother to roll her eyes.
"You have no idea how much trouble it is to brush her hair, Dad. She hates it and you'll just give-in the second she squirms and says it hurts. You're a softie and she's used to hating me when I do it." And her mother dragged her away to the luggage crowded room they used when they visited her grandparents' house, bright with careless grandparent love. She cried and screamed while her mother yanked a pokily-bristled brush through her hair, ripping it out based on the feelings bolting from her scalp.
But as she cried over her tea she didn't remember the teary end of that miraculous moment of feeling perfectly loved—though she remembered countless occasions where her mother treated her hair and her little emotions just the same. The memory wasn't like so many of the others, rare instances of being in perfect sympathy with the soul beside her, where someone came in a ruined the beauty she found for a moment.
Her grandfather would go on lifting her hair in a poor imitation of the wind, her fancy bringing it all to life, her belly jiggling with laughter forever. Somehow he was still doing it. She closed her eyes and felt the peculiar tingling on her head, as if the chunks of hair, now thick and heavy, long, were being lifted off her shoulders, Grandpa's breath—bread and vegetable juice—feathering over her, the sun steaming into her closed lids not the overhead kitchen light. And it was perfect again. Forever. That one memory.