Most Beautiful Eyes

The most painful part is that I had no idea what was coming……

I can still remember the first time I held her, a baby two weeks old beautiful with blond curls and deep big blue eyes. I remember the way she smelled of baby powder and innocence like a little flower fragrant and sweet. My family had just moved in next door and my mother had hired her father to install mini blinds in the rooms of our house. He was a nice man, young then no more than 25 and out of work, he had no real trade but enjoyed working with his hands and was quite good at it. I stood in the doorway of “my” new room 13 years old and already spoiled, watching him as he screwed in the blinds. “Do you babysit?” he asked, I never had before but my parents were broke and I figured it would  be a good way to keep me in stylish clothes and occupy my nights. I nodded, “Great!” he replied “my son Benjamin is 2 and my daughter Chelsea just turned two weeks old”. After that first introduction I saw and played with those children everyday, sometimes several times a day for the next 5 years, they became so much more than my neighbors they became my family. I watched as Chelsea took her first steps and Ben got his first stitch, I was there every Christmas morning as the kids tore into wrapping paper and smiled at their parents and the presents. I stood on my porch in amazement as their father would load both of his kids into his boss’s Mercedes and take them for a “spin” around the neighborhood even though he had no car of his own. I remember tucking Chelsea and Ben in and walking in their rooms every hour to “check their breathing.” I recall the third baby Noah being born and it feeling then like an obvious attempt to save an already fractured marriage. Finally, I remember the divorce, the destruction and the void it left in those babies, so many questions with little to no answers. Mostly though I remember Chelsea, the glowing ethereal girl with the high pitched voice, I remember her  ringing our doorbell and asking us to help her “wook for wizards” or “look for lizards” once she got older. When I turned 18, I left for college and after my own parents divorce my mother moved out of the house next door fleeing a mortgage that was too high and a house that was too big. I still saw the kids and their mother when I came home for Holidays and long weekends, and I would still play with  them everyday over the Summers instead of going to Summer school. They were growing up, happy and healthy, still those same babies only growing taller and getting older. From the very start I had such a hard time relating to her, I loved her from the moment I saw her and while we were connected we were not the same. Both of us were Pisces but otherwise different, she loved all things girly, dresses, jewelry, purses and when she was young Minnie Mouse. She dressed up as Minnie Mouse three Halloweens in a row because she had no desire to be anything else. It was the perfect costume, Minnie mouse who lived in a magical castle in the “happiest place on earth.” I believe she spent her whole life looking for her castle and happy ending. A short journey, 15 years from start to finish it ended sad and ugly on her bedroom floor, no happily ever after, no white horse just my baby girl alone in her room dying.

www.chelseagreco.com