Author Information
Eloisa
Eloisa
By: Paola Pavón
The room feels at an approximate temperature of 20° Celsius degrees and, nonetheless, I can feel sweat dripping from the back of my neck to the end of my spinal cord. The walls are a light blue, there’s a Jackson Pollock’s painting hanging on the wall and a big clock that marks the hour. The sofa I’m resting on is uncomfortable, the friction of the fabric against my skin is making me itchy but I don’t tell the doctor that. It’s a nice sunny day outside, the sun hiding behind some of the fluffy clouds that remind me of cotton balls cover the baby blue sky of the early morning. In the distance, if you look hard enough, you could see the glow of the orange sun peeking over the towns buildings and vast hills and trees. The doctor starts talking, explaining how we will work on the next sessions and in her voice, I sense a dull grey. I don’t like it. According to psychology, colors have certain influence on people and these produce or feed into sensations and emotions. I see people and in them I see a specific color that defines who they truly are, their wishes, their worries, their suffering.
But I could never figure out Eloisa’s color.
She’s an indestructible girl, looking at her hurts but not being able to do so kills. She’s a complete mess, when I heard her voice for the first time she gave me the impression of a pale pink kind of girl, inviting me to hold her in my arms and give her all the love I’ve kept inside me since María left, but when we made love for the first time in her soft moans I noticed a dark violet that sent chills through my arms and dried my mouth. I ignored it, because the precious views that her hands would paint over my body clouded my judgment and, for a brief second, I lost control of my life. I gave her a white blank page and my favorite pen and she wrote in it with blood.
On an evening of July, we were both laying on the floor of my new apartment, the air conditioner wasn’t working, she was resting her head on my belly and I counted the freckles that stained her porcelain skin. How do I wish she hadn’t worn those stupid yellow pants, maybe then she wouldn’t be such a distinct memory.
“You need to know that the day I leave, I don’t come back.” She sounded so confident, she didn’t care about what could possibly be what I wanted.
It was in that moment that I saw how the green of her eyes took over her whole self, she kept telling me about her adventures and I felt small because my biggest adventure was loving her. I saw her free, without nothing tying her down to this world that didn’t deserve her. I also knew I’d hate her. I’d hate missing her and searching for her in every strangers’ eyes, walking until my feet bled picking up the pieces of her heart, listening to her voice in the rain that’d torment my sleep, climbing up to the roof of the tallest building to scream I love her and she never loved me back. Sometimes she’d say she liked me, in those nights where her soul would turn a sad navy blue. I fell in love with her disaster and every night I prayed to a God I no longer believe in that she’d fall in love with mine.
It wasn’t until she disappeared that truth hit me hard. She was so changing and I was so busy adoring the cuts that gave her so many hues that I didn’t notice how self-destructive she could be when she’d cry at 4 A.M., how after letting me hold her in my arms she liked to make love in a frenetic manner, that when we’d go out she’d smile and flirt with strangers just to reassure me she could, that her favorite book is “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, that she was never able to watch a complete sunset, how she’d watch me write and ask me to make her a villain in my stories, that her hands would leave an unique trace on my bare back when we slept together, how she’d stay up all night just to make sure I wouldn’t go anywhere and then screamed at me the next morning, that she liked to undress her soul, that her color has always been red.
