Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

He was nearly thirty, lean and tall with pale sapphire eyes; and I was drawn to him, curious what had taken him into these dark woods.

But despite reason, I smiled in the dark; that night under our covers, we were a beautiful and thriving island.

I trusted my husband so purely, as raindrops trust the ocean as they’re falling.

“Every person exists in their own shallow bowl, and they can’t see over the rim,” he explained. “But they think that their world is the world—

the truth. When in reality, no two bowls are identical, and all people are stuck trapped in their own.”

“Cities, like people, have personalities and energies,” Corrina told me. “Different ones will welcome different souls.”

I thought about how an admission of uncertainty is so often, in our culture, seen as weakness. Yet it is only when a mind admits I do not know that it becomes open to unseen possibility, and honest inquiry.

when a mind admits I do not know that it becomes open to unseen possibility, and honest inquiry.

In this way, humility is the necessary precondition for all learning.

Next, I read a theory by George R. R. Martin, a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction. “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners,” he explained.

The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed . . . as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.”

I disappear deep into pictures of that drizzly afternoon: Justin and I on a rocky platform lined with lilies, a fog of mountain clouds erasing the faint path in the grass,

And I will make a fire for you Set your tent up in the rain Hold you in my arms ’Til you’re safe and warm again Wake you from your nightmare

Wipe away your tears One day we will marry, come back here

My love for him is the color of remembered vacations: rosebud pink and silver, inexplicable in their wonder and their glory.

Of course I was nineteen, then—I didn’t yet understand that the longer you look at something beautiful, the less you see it.

quoting the cursive line that had been printed on our blue wedding invitations: “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

Yet I was a human artist, and a hot blue flame in me still needed the validation that my days and months of painful writing had not all been for nothing.

In grief, we find a new view—a fresh perspective, which organically generates fresh expansion: personal revolution. Because in the wake of devastation, growth becomes the only survival option. In this way, loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.

This is so true. It's often looking back on what we've lost that helps us appreciate what we now have.