The sky looks different today.
The sky is soft, murky and blue behind the sharp and brazen yellow sun.
As the years have gone by, I’ve noticed the sky begin to change.
Every day it has become something beyond my wildest dreams.
As I sit on my wooden chair handmade by my dear Ally sipping away my misted glass of icy ginger beer, I see the birds dancing in the glittery skies allowing their feathers to touch the paint of this picture that will only last awhile and never be the same again.
Tomorrow is my ninetieth birthday and I realise that it has been quite a ride.
I remember just the other day when I was eighty. Jude came to the house before the sun even showed her face.
As I said, the days have changed every day and that day the sun had hid shyly behind the clouds and cried over every heartache she had ever felt. Jude had planned a garden tea…
The cake was drowned in rain, but it was a glorious day.
Allen and I grabbed our walking sticks and danced in the rain as Jude shouted at the kids to get everything inside at once.
Allen and I always embraced chaos and found the small detail that would make us smile like young lovers again.
When we were seventy, Allen decided that we would be teenagers again.
He decided to take us to see a film.
He had bought each of us a bowl of popcorn and I remember how much he loved to frustrate me by chewing at the quietest parts of the film. I frowned at him and he merely caught my eyes glaring into his, gave a knowing smile that spread from ear to ear and kissed my forehead and I was a goner.
Allen was such an infuriating man.
He seemed to always know how to make my heart catapult into space and back, no matter what age we were.
I recall him quickly squeezing my hand when I was sixty.
It was while we were dancing at the senior’s tea in our old, rickety church and I felt as if I might faint.
He watched my eyes steadily and held my gaze. I held onto his hands that had once been so smooth, and were now etched with fine lines that told our story.
I remember that I didn’t want to be old.
I enjoyed him telling me that I still looked as young as the day we had first met when I was forty.
When we were twenty, he promised me that he would dance with me under the stars.
He fulfilled that promise on my fiftieth birthday for our wedding anniversary.
He looked at me with so much love in his eyes.
That look of pure adoration never faded.
I remember that look of adoration in his eyes when I was thirty and I had finally accomplished my studies.
He had painted my new classroom for me, as Allen was an artist.
He painted the roof a perfect night sky filled with stars so that he wouldn’t forget his promise to take me dancing.
Although, we danced while we waited for the paint to dry and I’ll never forget that glow in his eyes.
I remember when I was seventeen.
Allen and I hadn’t even met yet, but I already believed in love.
I had sat in the hospital waiting for news when an elderly man from my church struck a conversation with me.
He told me the story about how he had met his wife and how he fell in love with her and I could see his love for her as he told the stories with so much adoration and love in his eyes.
I fell in love with the way he told stories, as if the scene was playing right before his spectacled eyes.
I memorised the way the sky had looked that day, as the dear sun had fallen in love that day.
She was in love with the painting before her eyes that foretold the story of humans that fell in love with the idea of maybe perhaps falling in love someday and noticing the little things in life.
When I was seventeen, I decided that I wanted to fall in love.
I wanted to have that gleam in my eyes, so I wrote about it in 600 words.
(Eds note: This story has been reproduced exactly as it was submitted with no changes mad.)
