Your favorite color was red. That was clear. Your hair was red, your favorite pair of heels, your lipstick. Yet, interestingly, you lived as a beige curtain; draped at the mercy of the breeze and its moods. You carried the belief that hunger is a suggestion. Teaching your children this suggestion, too. You raised them like glowing lanterns. On the backs of Summer heat and stress. Stress wrapped in smiles, cause nothing is ever wrong. But your daughters could hear the wind chimes on the back porch, every afternoon, every evening whispering another truth. They’d smell the painted wood planks under their feet, baking in the sun. They’d smell the grass and shake hands with peace. Those children don’t exist anymore.
Would you have chosen red flowers to match the living room today? It’s a Spring day and the day is blooming. Then again, you never chose flowers. You never had a chance to be so romantic. Rather, you were thunder in a fine porcelain shop. Clashing, but claiming to love the boldness you exuded. Skimming humidity from the storm, wringing out humor in drops to abstain the meaning of dawn. You were afraid of the dawn. What it might mean to open your eyes to an unfamiliar daybreak.
You left a residue of your famous lipstick on the philosophy of the living. Biting into the sandwich of life, leaving lipstick stains on the bread. The bread; zero preservatives, low calorie. The cosmetics, the covering up. The jagged eyeliner applied in a haste. All to mask the beauty and flavor of now. ‘How to numb the now?’ One might wonder. Move on to tomorrow before today. Add a glass of wine, add another. Plan a vacation that will happen in a whole year's time. Add some poorly cooked dishes. Not because they’re particularly difficult to cook, but because there’s no time for learning the patience to perfect them. Add one messy Christmas tree in December; lights flung like haphazard jungle vines. Glass ornaments placed without sentiment. Because it’s what’s done, what everyone does in December. Don’t be religious, but don’t question it either. Include hollow lessons from this month’s self-help book, and hollow claims of one’s soul’s evolution, to avoid getting too close to the heart. Wrap it all up in a leopard print coat. Clean, and clean again, each corner of the house spotlessly. No dust bunnies or rabbits or dogs or tigers. No animals at all. No sign of life beneath the bleach.
The funny thing is, you’d probably laugh reading this, too. You never did change, and you loved that about yourself. But I still wonder what character you were trying to play.
Perhaps it is because of you that I know my own hunger so well. I can feel it, relentlessly. I know there is action to take. Perhaps it is because of you that I am not afraid of it, as you were. I’m beginning to understand we can’t acknowledge what’s been gone, but we can understand what is missing in its absence. Only then can we beam a light in its place and hope to expose another piece of ourselves for the next generation.
I write this thinking back on your life. I mourn you, for you. Yet, I spoke to you this morning. For you are still in the depth of life, but I fear you will never confront its more potent undercurrent. I think you’re afraid to face the mirror of self-examination. I think we all are, to some extent.
However, as much as I want to taxonomize you, to see you in broad daylight, I can only understand you in the way daylight can understand the night. In a passing conversation between the realms of dawn and twilight. We can never truly understand each other. I realize I’ll never know you more than an onlooker of traffic knows each passing car. I think that might be true for every daughter and their mother. But, after getting to know you for a few decades, I have begun to understand something about this relationship. Despite the beige color that you appear to be in my eyes, it’s possible your life has been brimming with colors that I cannot see. I wonder if your palette has been full, all along, of shades that I don’t understand. And perhaps I’m not meant to. Maybe we are each meant to live in the world of shades we invent for ourselves, and that’s all we’re required to do. Except, the problem is, I do find myself all the more curious about you as I get older. I suspect you may not be that reduced character from my memories.
If that is the case, anyway, to live in the colors of one’s own, then I hope you continue to invent your own for as long as you can. And maybe in another few decades, I will begin to be able to see them, too. Maybe one day red won’t be your favorite color anymore, although that seems unlikely. The only thing I can say for sure is that I intend to enjoy my own process of life, of throwing paint to a canvas and seeing what sticks. I even intend to learn the patience required to watch it all dry. And if you’ve taught me nothing else, at best you’ve shown me how to hold the paintbrush. And for that, I’m grateful.
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