Anne Gudger

All the Blues

I crossed the Atlantic to find my feet away from him. We’d been a couple since we were both 14. Coupled through high school. Through two years of college. Turned out I was with him longer than I was with my first husband, but I didn’t know it then.

I found letters from him a few moves ago when I made myself sift and pitch from every memory box. He called me Magic. Drew suns around his name and hearts around mine. Always said, “I love you.” Not the shortened, love you. That I in I love you is everything.

“Look out the window,” he said all those years ago when it was late at night and the phone lines stretched between us.

“See the moon?” he asked, and I listened to him breathe. I pictured his mouth with that gap between his front teeth.

“I give you the moon,” he said.

“I’ll always hold you in the moon.”

Before I crossed the Atlantic to find my feet away from him, we’d drive around Los Angeles in his toffee-colored Toyota Corolla, windows down where we’d smell oranges and jasmine. Windows up where the heat crisped concrete. Where we smelled rotten vegies, fast food thrown from car windows, the sour of overbaked mayo and pickles.

In those drives, I loved the Chicano gang graffiti even though I didn’t understand it. The hard angles of the letters. The layers. The stacking. I loved the edges where spray paint blurred from swaths of color to firm outlines. I loved the names that felt like code: Loca. Negra. Shorty. I loved the looseness and the precision. It was easy to imagine people tagging walls, underpasses, overpasses in sweeps of spray paint. Claiming space. In blues and reds and yellows. Black against white tile. White against concrete with black outlines.

“I’ll paint you a wall,” he said, and I couldn’t have loved him more.

“You’ll drive by it some day and know it’s from me to you.”

“I’ll use all the blues you love.”

Sky blue. Ocean blue. Sapphire. Indigo. Prussian.

What if I hadn’t left the last time I left? What if I’d let the dream spool out? This life we painted of forever after. With kids and a home and a place to create: to write words and music, grow a garden, plant trees. Hold the cosmos in our hands and say it was ours.

Instead I broke it. We were too young. How could we last? I wanted other adventures, other loves. I was convinced staying would lead us down the road his parents and mine had rutted out: divorce, drinking, depression. Depression. Drinking. Divorce. Maybe that’s a more accurate order.

Over thirty years and two marriages and two kids. A happy heart. A life carved from wounds. A life carved into love. And still when I see street art, I think of him. I squint at the blues and wonder if he left them for me.

Anne Gudger is the author of THE FIFTH CHAMBER, published with Jaded Ibis Press, which won a silver medal with Foreword Review. Kirkus Review called it “An emotionally riveting memoir, raw and inspiring.” She’s been published in Newsweek, The Rumpus, Sweet Lit, Real Simple Magazine, Atticus Review, Citron Review, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, The Normal School, KHORA, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She has been a Best of the Net Nominee twice and has won a handful of essay contests. In March 2020, with her beloved daughter, she co-founded Coffee and Grief: a community that includes a monthly reading series focused on grief. Everybody grieves and when we share grief, we feel less alone. They then launched a podcast called Coffee, Grief, and Gratitude. Anne’s big purpose is to normalize grief, to give grief a microphone. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her beloved husband. Her favorite sweet is Dark chocolate salted seafoam!