Crashing Into Blue

Chapter 2

I realized that I wasn't leading a typical childhood, or much of a typical life for that matter, when I found out that most kids didn't have a rock-room in their house (which was what Indigo and I dubbed ours when we were eight), and if they did it was tucked away in the garage along with the power tools and the sporting equipment; out of sight, out of mind.

Whenever I would go over to Samson's house, who I've known and been best friends with since we were six years old and who lives just down our sleepy beach town road, I could never understand why we had to stop playing at six o'clock sharp. We would practice for band at his house; he played the trumpet, I played the acoustic guitar, and Indigo played the cymbals. Not a second passed the hour, and without fail, Samson's mom would peek her head into the garage and stop us. It's like she had an internal clock that timed our fun. I mean, in a sense I do get it; I know the racket that we made was nothing Hans Zimmer would be proud of, but Samson always wished it could last for just a little while past six.

At home, our mom always encouraged us to play whenever we wanted, however we wanted, and most importantly, as loud as we wanted; she was always getting us new sheet music, and she simultaneously bought Indigo her fourth cymbal and my first amp for our thirteenth birthday (which was the absolute noisiest birthday to date).

In our house, the rock-room takes up an entire room on our first floor, with it typically breaking the seams of its confinement and flooding into the main living space. Having guitar picks stick onto our bare feet, or almost rolling our ankles on a drumstick is a daily occurrence. For our family, art is always fully on display and tickling at the edges of every thought. This says a lot, since we live in a small coastal town on the West coast where every other person is having a marijuana-induced revelation or being sent divine messages through their heat stroke. We all claim to be artists, but I truly believe that paint, notes, and ink runs through our Greyson family veins. In the case of my mother, Elorie Greyson, I think more than her veins are filled with art; I think it makes up her entire being.

With painting her lifelong passion, my mom has always loved the small ocean side town that she grew up in, the one that Indigo and I have grown up in, constantly saying that one never leaves the place that sets your heart racing and your hands tingling for a canvas. I guess that motto changed momentarily once upon a time when that place became a person, specifically a young man named Davis. Davis was the heir to a large family business, sleek and charismatic, and in town for a vacation with his college buddies. He was exactly what my hippy grandparents never pictured for their free-spirited daughter; therefore, that made him perfect in every way.

Davis took our mom back to his home in upstate New York, and soon enough Indigo and I came into the picture. He was around long enough to give us cringe worthy middles names (I got Marianne, Indigo got Louisa), to set up some trust funds (thank goodness for that train of thought, or else mine and Indigo's Juilliard dreams would have been nipped at the buds), and to see us go from diapers to pull ups. But eventually the baby blues that our mother was initially diagnosed with after our birth started to warp into something more severe. Gone were the vibrant beach sunsets, and in their place was a smoggy cityscape. To make matters worse, our grandparents both passed away in a car accident around this time, dragging our mom deeper down her personal rabbit hole.

Soon enough our small family, minus one of its members, came back to the sand and to the salt, to the house that my mother grew up in and the one that was left in her parents' will in her name, completely paid off. There are some memories that you form as a child that are so vivid they're seared into your brain and you can recall them with one hundred percent accuracy. Here's one of mine: my mother sitting Indigo and I down on the back porch, walking straight towards the portion of the beach that our house backs up onto, ramrod straight and fully clothed in black, and submerging herself in the ocean. Thinking back on that memory, I feel like we were witnesses to her rebirth, a phoenix rising from the ashes. But in this case, it was a mermaid sinking back into her blue heaven.