For Cedric 2.

Good God it's gorgeous out here. You ever been out west in springtime, Cedric? You wake up one morning dressed in your winter pajamas with a double comforter and you look out the window and it's as if the trees have suddenly exploded with tiny green buds tipped with white and pink and purple, and I tell you the buds are all over the place, and then there are little green shoots rising out of perennials you thought had been dug up and eaten by squirrels way back in October. Honest, Cedric, it was rainy and miserable just yesterday and now here I am swinging my bare feet out over the edge of the porch and licking a drippy orange popsicle with the sticky stuff running down my elbows (which has attracted all the floating red-and-gray dog hairs in the vicinity like a supermagnet) and wearing nothing but a t-shirt and yoga pants! Just when you think everything has gone to hell and you just cannot stand another day of rain and wet underwear and damp mildewey stink lingering in your kitchen coating your broccoli and salmon fillet with its sharp penetrating odor, and just when the dog has come in one too many times with wet ears that lead to ear infections because, for God's sake, of course I got stuck with the only dog in Washington that's practically allergic to water – just when life's all coming up around your ears and you have to bend your neck all the way back to suck in the air that remains above the rising tides, that's when you wake up on a day like this and remember why it is you even bother to breathe. The air is so sweet, so suddenly sweet with new green buds and birds hopping around in the branches that all there really is to do, at least at first, is sit and absorb the soft sun bouncing off the dew drops that glint on the teeny tiny green bits (which are really just everywhere, you know). Honest, Cedric, you must take a visit out here sometime in your life and soak some of this up, it's got to be the best spring there is anywhere. 

Maybe even better than back home. 

Oh you remember those delicious spring days after school was out and we'd all just tear out of the building and hold hopscotch races and watermelon-seed spitting contests! Or... well that may have taken place a bit before you awoke from....well you know. Anyway, Cedric, I have diverted from my purpose in writing this letter. I remember how you always seemed drawn by colors, mixing colors and using colors (and wearing them, God knows you wore a good half a mishmashed rainbow on the daily), but good God Cedric we all thought you'd go on to be an....Oh I don't know, a mailman or a...something, anyway. But a Painter! How free! How comfortable it would be to wake up mornings and think, I am a Painter and I will have my cup of coffee and then I will Paint something, because that is what Painters like me do. I think this, probably, because clocking in every day at work is tiresome and I am chained to my desk like a prisoner held hostage with a weight on my ankles and striped tattered clothes until five, when I am allowed to clock out. If I were to want a cup of coffee, it had better be before nine or after five, because otherwise I am stuck sipping that tepid brown-colored water that comes out of the machine at the offices. 

I do remember your pretty eyes, Cedric. They were stormy sea green flecked with tiny bits of gold and outlined in bold by your heavy lashes and I sort of always (in the back of my mind, you know) wished I could paint them and show them to you, because it seemed you never stopped to look at anything much, especially your own reflection. But, being the equivalent of a tone-deaf singer when it comes to art, I have only ever been able to sit and look and never touch a brush myself. But those eyes, and now a day like today, they make me want  – so badly – to be able to paint even a little. When I close my eyes to it though and let the colors dance for that splitsecond behind my lids...Honest Cedric, it's better than any painting I've ever seen. To answer your question-that-was-not-really-a-question, Cedric – yep, I've done that sort of a lot especially today because it's my eyes that are painting, and it's the closest I ever get to making art. 

Is that what you paint, Cedric? 

Nikki

For Cedric.

Cedric.

I see you haven’t changed one single bit. You are the same snot-nosed little boy who would pop gum in Ms. Liebgott’s face and make fun of her name just because it had the word “love” in it. Remember the time you pulled your shorts down in front of her car and wagged your pink little butt at the one-way glass, just because she hadn’t been able to name the Pokemon you’d drawn in class? (It was Mewtwo, I remember, because you borrowed my favorite purple colored pencil to draw it and broke the tip so bad I had to sharpen it until my arm practically fell off, so I could get the point just right again, and when you gave me that drawing my jaw fell so fast it hurt, especially since your ears were red and you looked like you actually felt sorry so I kept your drawing until my mother accidentally put it through the wash with my red Christmas socks and it turned into pink pulpy mush and had to be thrown out with the leftover chicken bones and potato peels.) People notice more than you think, Cedric.

Cedric, did you know that when you fell into that crevice in that godforsaken place your father took you to and were in the hospital for all that time we were back at school and everyone heard all about it. Well, anyway we were trying to find out as much as we could, but first step was, figuring out what the heck coma even was. Jill thought that meant you’d died and she burst into tears right smack-dab in the middle of the hallway. I was embarrassed for her, for god’s sake. I had to drag her into the classroom and sit her down and make her wipe her face off while I got the Webster’s Dictionary Unabridged Version and read off the definition of a coma, just to make her shut up. It read,     

Coma\Co"ma [Latin, hair, from Greek ko`mh.] n.  1. A state of deep and often prolonged unconsciousness; usually the result of disease or injury.  2. A usually terminal tuft of hairs especially on a seed.  3. The luminous cloud of particles surrounding the frozen nucleus of a comet; forms as the comet approaches the sun and is warmed.

We figured you were the first one, since you are not a seed, and even Jill knows what a comet is and you are not a comet. It sounded serious though, and we wondered how what kind of ice it could have been to make you so sick. We started tiptoeing at recess, avoiding the real icy patches and taking turns using Lacie’s electric hair dryer to melt it off around the doorways (because the cord only reached that far) so nobody would slip on the ice and get coma. Teachers were talking about you, Cedric. Talking with their worried faces, the ones they reserve for talking about the stock market and extreme tornado warnings ­– not the angry faces they always used when they talked about you before you got coma. That made me scared, too. Even though all you ever did was give me that dumb picture of Mewtwo and break my favorite purple pencil. People notice more than you think, you know.

If all I ever did was eat paste, Cedric, then all you ever did was talk about it.

Nikki.