In my early twenties I wore blue velvet for it's cachet.
Sometimes in black comedy movies, there will be a predictable scene where the heroine will be standing in a crowd and she'll throw back her head and scream up to the heavens in frustration while the camera spirals out to show she's just one fish in the sea. Cue laughter, segue into next frame.
I reached that point over the past few days.
I have a cheering section. They're wanting me to go and be happy. I'd like to go and be happy but HELLO, I have this cloud hanging over me that won't go away any time soon. I'm still using the new tub of margarine Jake opened before he died and I'm weirdly skimming the edges. There's a tower of margarine in the middle from where he stuck his knife right in, leaving whole wheat crumbs in it, buttering bread for Henry.
That's dumb. A monument that will soon be used up, though I'll probably just throw it away.
Sleeping in shirts owned by the dead. Living for nothing, blind to a future I can't conjure up in my head no matter how hard I try.
And this. This weird pressure that no one is going to be shocked or sad or disappointed if I step out of my mourning clothes and come back to life and it's a heavy burden. It's a leap I have no courage to make right now and they pat my head and tell me I should just do it anyway and one withdraws into himself and bites his tongue so as not to have an opinion at all even though I squeezed one out of him anyway and it wasn't so bad after all.
I went back to therapy this morning. I sat in the chair and drank their institutional-tasting coffee and we caught up, beginning with how the holidays went and I mostly talked about how leaving the house was better than staying in it and how much of my life is currently conducted around what people might think and why, at this point, I would even care.
I don't. Somehow in the past year I was conditioned to behave in the way a...a...a...minister's wife would behave. Proper. But I've always been proper, because of the way I wanted to be perceived. A cold and high-strung girl who made the right apologies and wrote thank you notes and helped out without being asked and inside was this completely depraved creature who wouldn't know proper if it throttled her breathless.
I managed to separate them even though they'd like to be together and finally when I couldn't name a single person or reason for not giving myself permission to have something I want I realized that maybe it's because I get to call the shots and I'm not ready to give that up quite yet. I was corrected quickly. The submissiveness remains. I pass the reins over without question, I mostly do what I'm told. Sweetly deferring. Always so sweetly so as not to hurt feelings.
Still.
And my mourning clothes are not black.
Instead I wear navy blue, a hue that sucks the sunlight right out of the sky. A hue that makes my eyes wash out and turns my hair to spun gold. A color I was assigned as a child when people died and my brown-haired sister wore black. Blondes had to wear dark blue, because black would wash me out. That was the way it was done.
I have a blue velvet hair ribbon that I tied around my ponytail hastily when Cole died, to cover a pink elastic. When I picked it up again when Jacob died it was still kinked in the middle. Not enough time. I didn't get enough time. I don't want the stupid ribbon.
I have work to do.
I cannot talk about it anymore.
