The Color of Whiskey

“Blue, blue, blue. Blue is the color of my eyes, not yours.  It’s not the color of water. The water was gray and green and fast and without light, without sou.d. The sky was blue, but what does it matter now, with the gray all around and the light falling fast. What does blue even matter anymore”

-Megan Devine

Choose any color. Let your mind follow that color to a memory, or a scene, or a story of any kind.

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Whiskey. He is the color of whiskey, liquid amber, drawing you in to watch it catch the light. Warming and numbing. Dangerous and dynamic. 

Whiskey colored snow. On an early date. A bitter, shoulder hunching night with cigarettes on a patio. Our beverages warming us almost as much as the heat growing between us. Our small glasses a stark contrast against the snow. The ice clinking in mine, a chorus to our laughter. His neat like his newly cut fade. The liquid refracting the headlights that pass in our urban neighborhood, casting its warm brown hue against the snow. Cold hands escaping gloves to find each other and smiles kissing lips and then lips kissing smiles. The color of whiskey in breath and body. The amber moves through and moans against our skin. The color of whiskey grows hotter. We build a fire with it.

Whiskey colored eyes. They were always that color, but there was the night I couldn’t stop drinking them. There were card games and silly hats, sitting cross legged on his bed. There was the story about his little brother and the water moccasin and the time I danced on stage with a funk band. But these are the details, and the devil ain’t in them. It doesn’t matter which sheets were on the bed or what we had for dinner. What matters is his eyes. Dancing over the absently played cards between us. His eyes squinting with his open mouthed belly laugh. His eyes smiling on my face across a shortening distance, apart and yet, feeling my cheeks warm to the whiskey fire in his eyes. Tipsying into love, or something close to it.

Whiskey colored fire. Late summer weekend in the mountains. We forgot plates and eat eggs on old magazines that were hiding behind the driver’s seat. He forgot his axe so cracks firewood by hurling logs at rocks. I forgot his guitar, so we sing acapella by the fire. The whiskey colored fire he built. It relaxes my usually tightly wound knot so that I do nothing but laugh at these oversights.  We keep the beer cold in the stream behind our tent and listen to the roaring wind in the trees. I make a list in my journal of the things to remember next time. He loves my lists. The only other thing I write is, “I am in the woods with the man I love.” We are too busy holding hands and talking to the amber flames and each other for me to write any more.

Whiskey eyes. They are no longer just whiskey colored. They are whiskey infused. When I get home from my board meeting, his left eye lists more than his right, and I know it’s going to be that kind of night. The whiskey eyes ignore me, then plead with me, then accuse me. I probe, I listen, I defend. I try to be calm. It is escalating. He is escalating, and there is nothing I can say. I am scared to stay and scared to leave. Those whiskey soaked eyes look into mine, blurry from his big, hot tears. He holds my chin, looks deep into my eyes and says, “I’m just so sad.” I take his head in my lap and rock him, thinking the wave has crashed with the tears that wet my thighs. He takes a deep breath. My chest opens with relief until he turns those whiskey eyes on me and they flash. I am scared. It takes him seconds to cross our 400 square foot apartment to where the handgun I never liked sits above the washing machine. It’s in his mouth and it takes me less seconds to get to him and wrestle it from him. The only time I had ever needed to scream for my life was in those paralysis dreams where you can’t move your legs or open your mouth. Turns out I can do it. I can scream to save a life. His whiskey eyes accused me of ruining his life as they took him away to the hospital.

Whiskey colored snow again. But, I am not there this time. No one is laughing and no fire is burning. I don’t know if the light lit through the bottle of Maker’s Mark that sat next to him in the snow. They told me it was really coming down up there that day. But, I can imagine what it looked like next to the blue tarp he brought with him. Iridescent against the deep and pure snow pack. I can only hope it kept him a little warm as I could not. I wonder how much he had before he wrote to me about the burning skyscraper he was in. I wonder if he listened to music or had second thoughts. I wonder if he could imagine his father and I returning to that spot two days later, hiking through snow that scraped our thighs, to see the whiskey colored stain in the snow where he completed his wish. How his dad would let me lie in the snow, repeating “I’m sorry,” as I numbed my cheeks the way I could not numb the searing pain coursing through my veins. Did he imagine how his mother and aunts would not come any closer and were almost too bereft to hike back out? How his father, who no one had ever seen cry before, would melt the snow with his falling tears? How we would sit there and hiccup sob, while I told him how we wanted to name our first son after his father? No. I don’t think he wondered about that. He couldn’t. All he saw were whiskey flames. He didn’t want to die, but he was already on fire.

Whiskey colored stone. With a life captured in the frozen amber, like a prehistoric fly. I cannot see this color of whiskey, but the stone sits in my chest. A weight that makes it hard to breath. A life lived and done and left for us to carry.