The Color Red

There was a girl in my seventh grade home room class, a girl I knew little about. I knew she had curly hair - that was plain to see, and I knew she sat at a desk near mine. But, other than that...

Our desks were on the other side of the classroom, across from the classroom door. My desk was in the second row over from the windows, while her desk sat between the windows and me, but her seat was one seat further forward.

Were it not for the fact that she walked past my view of the windows every morning, I’m not sure I would have ever noticed her at all. We never talked and I’m pretty sure that she never noticed me and at the time, I don’t remember ever thinking twice about it, or about her.

I don’t remember her ever talking to anyone else, either. She would just smile contently to herself as she entered the classroom and she would hug her books tightly to her chest as she made her way through the homeroom havoc, over to her desk, where she would sit down and arrange her books neatly in front of her.

While other kids were talking with each other or gazing out the windows, she would sit there facing the front of the classroom, her hands folded on top of her neatly arranged books, quietly smiling to herself the entire time. Always quiet, always smiling.

Looking back, I think she liked the color red. I remember noticing that she would often wear the same red dress. And later, I remembered that sometimes she would wear a red sweater - and if she didn’t wear a red sweater, she would wear a white sweater, but with a red blouse underneath. 

One morning during that seventh grade winter, after the homeroom teacher had finally managed to quite the classroom, the morning announcements came over the speaker, just as they did every morning. But on this particular morning, it was announced that this little girl had died.

As the announcement continued, some kids whispered that "she was always sickly” and indeed, I remember thinking that, now that they mentioned it, I guess she was absent quite a bit. Someone else mentioned that one of her legs was shorter than the other and I remember wondering what that meant and if it were true, why did I never notice a limp?

I remember being shocked by the news of her passing- even though I didn’t really know her.

After the announcement, as the other kids resumed their conversations, I sat and looked over at the starkness of her empty desk. There was no smiling girl, no folded hands, no neatly stacked books. Suddenly, it was just the emptiness of her desk, framed by the darkness of the winter morning behind it.

Over the next several weeks I would look over at her empty desk with a feeling of loss and sadness. Over time though, I looked over at her desk less and less. Life moved forward and pulled me along with it, and this loss and those feelings, though not forgotten, drifted further and further away into the haze of time.

For most of my life, I never gave much thought about that time or much thought about the little girl. But eventually, with age and the accumulation of my own experiences, I’ve occasionally found myself thinking of her and about that winter morning.

Each time I think back, I've thought not only of the little girl, but increasingly, of her parents, as well - people whom I've never met.

I think about how hard it must have been for them to lose someone so young, someone they must have loved so much. I think about how difficult it must have been to get through the days, or worse, to get through the nights. I think about how difficult it must have been, year after year, to get through birthdays and holidays and other special occasions - times which were once joyous, but instead became moments which accentuated their loss.

And I think about how strange it is for me to be thinking about any of this at all - let alone to be thinking about it with such feelings of loss and empathy - not only for the little girl, who I never really knew, but also for her parents - people whom I never knew at all.

But in ways that I can’t articulate, I wonder if this is a part of how we’re all connected, if this is one way in which we live on - to be remembered and touched by the ripples of that memory, in this case some fifty years on - ripples set in motion by a little girl - a little girl whose name I never knew, a little girl who always smiled, a little girl who, I think, liked the color red.