Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

We walked for peaceful hours, sliding in and out of quirky districts: the waterfront world of the Embarcadero, past the Ferry Building’s fresh citrus stands and seaside cafés, into a community constructed along a three-mile engineered seawall from which wide clusters of floating wooden rafts housing plump sunbathing sea lions extended into the Bay, the creatures’ rhythmic barks like feral songs; North Beach with its Italian coffee bars and red and beige tablecloth homemade pasta shops, and the notorious storefront of City Lights bookstore like a sacred beatnik temple, its black and white checkered floor and arched wood doorways to corridors of books in every color, a high wide rainbow of brave stories; coastal Fort Mason, that hamlet with periwinkle hills beyond vibrant turquoise water and grass pure shamrock green, smelling of sunbaked rocks, the distant great orange-rose Golden Gate Bridge like a dollhouse model of itself, a wonder; the willow groves and red maples of the Presidio, leafy and profoundly lush.

Maybe this means something if you’ve been there. I was bored

whispered in the small cave of my love’s ear,

Ew. Ew. Ewwwww

A single black ant sped across the floor beyond our naked toes, and I wondered why I felt so oppositional.

Overwriting

Bypassing hollow small talk, she told me she liked my essay’s language, calling my descriptions of the woods and cold blue lakes “pretty and atmospheric.” From the author of ten books, this praise felt meaningful. Trying to conceal my glee, I just said, “Thank you!” “But truthfully, it’s too cryptic,” she told me. “It’s well written, but there’s no blood there.” She encouraged me to bare my heart in my sentences. “Your essay is just pretty air.” I bit my lip. I had the piercing urge to walk away, but doing so would have been ridiculous. “There wasn’t so much blood on the trail, unfortunately,” I protested. Pretty air is far more valuable than ugly blood, I thought—the music of the sentences is what creates the nuance of emotion, not the drama.

At 104th Street, a hidden rose patch blinked pink-green from behind rust-red foliage. Witch hazel and the magenta cones of butterfly bush appeared beneath the graceful boughs of maples shadowing empty gray-wood benches. Beside an erupting marble fountain, every petal looked animate and friendly. Resting together on a lonely bench, I asked Justin for his thumb. I doodled a strange constellation made of five star-swirls over the raised veins on the back of his hand with a blue pen. “This is kind of morbid,” he said, looking at the navy design, “but if you died today, I would have to get this as a tattoo.” Flattered for a moment by his perverse words of devotion, I felt my arm begin to tingle. Periwinkle clouds fringed with luminous peach light drifted, afloat in cobalt sky as Justin led me back under the ground. We resurfaced onto a strange street of manic lights, red and purple and yellow neon signs

Slicing honeydew for breakfast a week later, I got a call from Daniel Jones. The sky was overcast, but our apartment was strangely hot, and I sensed this wild-luck break was ending, bad news coming. On the phone, Mr. Jones asked me if Aspen Matis was my real name. I had to tell him no. I had been born Deborah Parker, and legally, I still was. “As the New York Times is nonfiction,” he told me, “we need to use your legal name.” Distracted, I grasped the handle of a pan in the oven with my bare hand, burning my palm. Holding the pain under cold water, I told him I understood. The throbbing sharp, I decided to formally change my name before my publication day.

Seems conflicting

Justin put my contacts in for me, torso bending, warm hands holding my face. I felt lucky to have this man who led me to New York and supported my vision in every way he was able.

This is an incredibly weird thing to brag about.

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 architects plan everything ahead of time . . . They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. 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.”

“dancing is against my religion.”

yes

“Drinking to cope with sadness creates future sadness.”

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

I am thinking about how the ocean contains every color on the spectrum of human emotion. Gold at birth, green at noon, navy in the depths of volatile night. Sometimes, it appears akin to blood. Or it will turn the crystal color of blue eyes. Right now the shadows of kites are flitting across it, and fields of sun-sky are painting azure everywhere. Black threads of distant birds drag over it like microscopic angels, barely perceivable.

twelve or fifteen masked people

How we are all always innocent in the stories that we tell about our lives—we first name ourselves as passive, helpless. Our default role in our own stories is of the wronged.