The Color of Venus

They say it’s always dark at the end, but the same can almost always be said of beginnings. Starts and finishes are, after all, like mismatched twins that don’t quite get along and hate hearing how similar they are to one another. But hating something never makes it any less true, no matter how much we may wish otherwise.

Jericho wasn’t sure what to do with his life now that Eden was no longer a part of it. They’d been painting the grand masterpiece of their future together ever since they were children and making concrete plans for it ever since they’d become adults. They’d have a small hand-fasting ceremony on the lavender hill behind the little yellow house where Jericho grew up before moving into a starter home in Devon, a pretty little pastel-colored housing community just outside of town.

They’d build a new life together while remaining connected to the friends and family that were the heartbeat of their old one. From there, they’d live happily ever after, of course. But no one ever talks about what happens next. No one asks what people do when a potential future full of peach-colored sunsets ahead of you is no longer enough to keep wonder in a heart and apple blossoms in a pair of eyes.

As it turns out, some people need more out of life than sunsets to admire. They need nourishing, brown bread in their stomachs and good, solid oak chairs to sit on while they eat it. Or at least that’s what Eden had said with pity in her purple eyes before leaving for a cabin in the mountains filled with all the oak furniture she would ever need. When Eden turned out the lights on her last walk through the front door, that’s when Jericho’s world had become dark, both literally and figuratively.

And he stayed there for a while, inhaling and exhaling thick lungfuls of the stale air around him, imagining Eden filling her weathered oaken cabinets with a limitless parade of round, brown, crisscrossed loaves that smelled almost exactly like the summer earth. But eventually, he began to picture a future saturated in color again — a future of his own that didn’t involve Eden (or anyone else, for the immediate moment) — but it wouldn’t happen here. He’d pick a new place and devise his own means of getting there. It would be very high up, even further away, and as peach-colored as can be. And as the gauzy memory of Eden’s violet-colored eyes faded, so grew the solid, metal walls of Jericho’s spaceship.

*

Jericho swept up the torn pieces of the peach-colored future he would never have with the woman he’d thought was the love of his life. He patched the places where the fabric had grown thin and threadbare and mended seams where they’d begun to fall apart in the wrong places. He then stitched the edges of the pieces together with bright yellow thread before stuffing them with the feathery insides of the peach-colored pillows he’d never sleep on next to his should-have-been, violet-eyed wife.

When he was done, he had a comfortable, custom-made seat that would keep him comfortable during the long journey he had ahead of him and a padded steering mechanism that turned smoothly at the slightest touch.

He dismantled the imagined walls of the Devon home he’d never bought — the mint-colored bricks and each shiny, rippled panel of the strong, metal roof. He broke them down into atoms that he refashioned into the rounded, saucer-like outer shell of a spacecraft. He polished it until it sparkled in the sunlight, cool and green as the juicy insides of the melons he loved in the summers.

It looked exactly like the spaceships in the science fiction comics he’d loved when he was a child — back when it had never even occurred to him that his wildest dreams wouldn’t come true someday. And as Jericho looked at his creation as it was coming together, something deep inside of him began to mend.

Next, Jericho took apart the mental images of the children he’d wanted to have with Eden, piece by piece and limb by limb. He took the steadiness from his never-son’s brilliant mind and the steely resolve from his backbone and built instruments that would never falter. He took the red from his wouldn’t-be daughter’s hair and the emerald from her eyes to light the dashboard in colors that would keep him on course always. He knit their imaginary bones together to form a very reliable, very powerful engine.

And then at night, when the shadows grew long and his heart would grow unexpectedly melancholy, Jericho would gather his sorrowful, acid tears in an incorruptible metal vessel. No one of them was capable of much on its own, but together they would become the fuel that would power his spacecraft and get him where he needed to be. He spun the silvery network of scars on his heart into a spacesuit that would keep him warm in the cold vacuum of space and fill his lungs with the life-giving air his lungs would never stop needing, no matter where he might one day hang his hat.

And after many moons had come and gone, Jericho’s great work was finished. There in his backyard stood a flying saucer on a trio of strong, metal stilts. It was dark and forbidding like the broken, sorrowful things that had come together to make it. But when the light of the moon hit its surface just right, it shimmered mint green and sparkled with the reflections of all the countless faraway stars overhead.

As Jericho thought ahead to the day he’d fly away from his old life forever, the beating heart in his chest grew conflicted. Dove-grey clouds of doubt would gather and then give way to razor-sharp, golden rays of hopeful light. It was the same heart he’d been born with, but with its scars removed and remade into something else, it was — at the same time — not the same heart at all.

*

Jericho’s heart harbored a dull, persistent ache the day he traveled to the little yellow house in front of the lavender hill to say goodbye to his grandmother who’d raised him. The only signs that she had been tending the lemon trees out back were the dark crescents of garden earth underneath her fingernails and the faint scent of sun-kissed citrus in her hair.

The roses in her cheeks when she smiled reminded Jericho of the peach sunsets he’d once pictured himself watching from his front porch with his violet-eyed wife by his side. And the salty tears she cried when he told her where he was going reminded him of the very ones he’d collected for months before he had enough to propel a spaceship all the way to his future home. He hated that he was the cause of his grandmother’s tears, but he also knew she’d eventually make them into something stable and capable of her own one day.

“I just don’t see why you have to go so far away, Jerry,” his grandmother had said. “There’s a whole world full of places you could make a home. It’s just a matter of picking one and making up your mind that you’ll be happy there.”

“But that’s the thing, you see,” Jericho replied. “I don’t want the kind of happiness you drag into existence, kicking and screaming. I want the kind that flows naturally in abundance because I’ve found a place that’s truly meant for me.”

Jericho’s grandmother nodded. She knew him, after all. And when his mind was made up, it was made up.

“Well, just know that you have a place here no matter what,” she said. “Should Earth ever call you back, that is.”

Jericho smiled a thin, sober smile as he hugged his grandmother. He couldn’t say with any certainty that he wouldn’t be back. But something many-times-mended deep inside of him knew he was done with blue skies and ready to find out if waking up under a peach-colored one would be everything he’d always dreamed it would be.

*

Jericho had decided to fly to Venus because of the color — gauzy white and velvet grey with creamy swirls of peach throughout. It looked so soft and welcoming in the pictures he’d loved so much as a little boy, like the broken but loving heart he had so carefully mended over the many months since Eden’s departure. If he could live anywhere in peace and harmony, he was sure it was there.

Under skies like those, he felt as if he could be anything… do anything. He could build an impossible house and fill it with furniture that was as impractical as he liked. He could earn his living building old-fashioned carriages or making perfect French fries in a restaurant that never closed. And maybe when the time was right, he would meet a yellow-eyed Venusian who loved the same light he did and have real children — children that had weight, substance, and breath.

He thought of these things as he zipped himself into the silvery spacesuit made of scars on his last morning on earth. He felt his spirit wake up and come to life as he flicked the switches on his dashboard and heard the spaceship’s engine powering up in preparation for launch. He buckled himself into the soft, cushioned seat he’d fashioned for himself out of his tattered dreams, gave the world around him one last mournful look, and pressed the red button that would launch the spaceship into space.

And that was the last anyone on planet earth ever saw of Jericho — the bewitching sight of the green metal saucer rising into the air before jetting out of existence in an instant with a blinding flash of green light. The skeptics said that there was no way he could have made it all the way to Venus, given the circumstances. But then, those same people wouldn’t have believed a person could build a very real spaceship out of very unreal materials, but there the spaceship had been just the same.

It was Jericho’s grandmother who was certain he’d made it, because her grandson was the kind of person who could do anything. And at night, she dreamed of visiting the impossible house under the peach Venusian skies one day when she’d finished building a spaceship of her own.

*

Originally published on Medium.