The Weight of it All

Ella Wallace shuffled down the hall after her mother's German Shepherd, Cooper, a yawn erupting sluggishly from her. The once clear plastic cone around the dog's neck continually snagged and then grazed along the walls, breaking up the serenity of early morning with short, choppy bursts of unpleasant scraping. The sky outside, Ella saw as she opened the back door for the dog to go out, was light though the sun had not yet risen. A pink smudge had faintly begun to paint itself across the lower horizon. As she gazed blearily outwards, Ella felt a fatigue in the lids around her eyes, she'd felt it in her dragging gait, and it sat heavily in the depths of her chest. She was tired. It was not yet even seven in the morning, but still, it was more than that, and Ella knew this.

Ella turned and slogged towards her mother's Keurig machine. It was a waste producing contraption of which she did not approve, but what choice did she have? Coffee was a necessity and since she'd left her life on pause to make the hours-long journey to stay with and help her mother, again, well, she needed coffee. Eyes glazed, she watched in a vaguely disinterested manner, seeing without truly seeing, as the brown, steaming liquid squirted forth from the machine. It filled the air with the aroma of fresh, if slightly burned, dark roast coffee. This invigorating smell alone, as it always did, began the process of awakening Ella, the lethargy of her eyes dethawing ever so slightly.

Lacing her chilly fingers around the imperfect, handthrown mug and taking a sip, Ella felt that relief that only the first sip of coffee against the promise of another shitty day could bring. Heaving the kind of sigh that her father would have questioned, she began to think of her dreaded to-do list. She would have to be the dog's caretaker as her mother slept after her night shift at the hospital. And, since nothing her mother nor Ella had tried had successfully curbed the dog from licking the stitches from his surgery, he wasn't healing. To help, she needed to look up new ways to try to keep the dog away from the surgical site. The longer he continued to not heal, the longer Ella would feel she needed to stay and help her mother. Ella unknowingly tensed against this thought, and rubbed her neck before returning her hand to her mug and taking another long sip of the steaming hot liquid. Furthermore, Ella thought, she needed to continue calling psychiatrists, she'd still been unable to find one, and her therapist wanted her to be assessed. This was a task that felt like claws raking across Ella's very heart as, quite frankly, it sucked. The caregivers she'd called had not been answering the phone or else had not been accepting new patients. It was disheartening, and Ella was loath to return to the task. On top of all that, she needed to continue working on her coding challenge practice. She needed to start interviewing for new software positions, she'd lost her job a month ago, and had yet to even apply for a single new one. 

Ella rolled her neck to and fro, managing to achieve multiple cracks and pops as her heart began to flutter uncomfortably, as it always did when thoughts of her current joblessness plagued her. She stilled herself, setting down the mug, then took several deep breaths, making sure the air reached the bottom of her lungs, making sure her stomach inflated with the effort. Yet, the air from the house was warm in her lungs with leftover heat from the sunny autumn day before; it was still and stale and consequently did little to quell her growing nerves. Ella's paranoia last night, after her mother had left for the hospital, had led her to close the windows against the wind, which had caused her mother's windchimes to jangle absurdly. Closing the windows had successfully curbed the creepiness of the house the night before, but had resultantly trapped that warmth which now oppressed her. The thickly stagnant quality of musty yet familiar smelling air caused a stirring sensation of subdued confinement to expand like a balloon in the pit of Ella's stomach. She countered the unwelcome sensation by opening the front door. Before she could enjoy the relief of fresh morning air, a scratching at the back door told her the dog was ready to come back in, and she crossed the house, then pulled the slider wide. As Cooper came in, scraping the cone across Ella's leg, the cool wind came with him, racing from the back and out the front door, violently whipping back the curtains and Ella's hair and the chandelier over the table and anything not held down, carrying on it the shockingly sharp and jarring smell, that unmistakable scent of a crisp autumn morning.

This smell, of chilled dirt and changing leaves and morning dew, of the season's first frost which would be chipped away from frozen to liquid terrectly, hit Ella so sharply that she stumbled back a step as if the wind, like two hands delivering a blow to her chest, had pushed her. Though Ella had visited and stayed with her mother in her childhood home to help many times since graduating college and beginning her career, this once forgotten smell of autumn bore into her like a drill, unearthing those latent sensations of early mornings; the kind of morning that spoke of that anxious excitement of going back to school after summer break, of the promise of new experiences, of life moving forward in the only fashion it could. It spoke of that progressive fashion in which her life had moved forward, from child to teen in this very place before reaching adulthood. It felt, in Ella's chest, like change and fear and new friends and loneliness. It ached, and the adolescent within her yearned for something that was just out of her grasp, something that alluded her as if it were merely in the next room over, and yet remained entirely unattainable. The wind smelled of that contradictory nature of early autumn mornings, of that near blinding brightness of a sun rising up into a cloudless sky, indifferent to the chilled, humid quality that hung in the air, the sole remnants of the seasonable chill of the night before. It was harsh, white sunlight, unperturbed by the first frost which had blanketed the world and its warmth would swiftly and efficiently melt the freeze down to the wetness of dew. 

This absurdly contradictory scent overwhelmed and transported Ella, taking her by surprise, and she stumbled back into a chair at the table, facing out the open slider. Ella's eyes widened as she was embraced by the cool, whipping air and the hauntingly familiar smell within the wind tunnel. Her clenched hand rose to her heart, pressure against that old, youthful pain that had lay dormant all these years. And yet, Ella pondered, perhaps it had been there all along. Perhaps this unhealed wound written across her being had been there when she'd failed difficult STEM courses in college. Maybe it was this exact sensation which had consumed her when, after her only date in college, instead of feeling that flood of joyful excitement that her friends had felt after successful dates, she had broken down. She'd sobbed, been unable to breathe, tumbling down the well of her very consciousness; a feeling as bad as if death were suddenly on the line. Maybe it was this sensation which had created the dark cloud which hung low over her head. This cloud was ever present, and though Ella had attempted to bring it to the light, to understand it, all efforts thus far had been in vain; it remained a burden which haunted her at every turn.

It was this dark cloud, afterall, which had ended every relationship she had ventured forth into. It was this massive vulnerability which all could sense in her. It was unwellness that clung to her, like wet tears on clumped eyelashes. It was sharp and  as present as an invisible gun to her back, holding her hostage to her own uncomprehended internal scarring at all times. Worst of all, though, it was written across Ella, she knew, quite plainly for all the world to see, for it was the deep purple quality of her sunken eyes. It was her tense, hunched posture, and sore, aching shoulders, which were exhausted from the burden of carrying such a load, all on her own, for so long. It was ever present when her dental hygienist commented on the deeply chewed up interiors of her cheeks. It was there when her therapist asked her to seek a psychiatrist. And it reared its ugly head when she felt more alone in a group of people then she ever felt when she was by herself. It was that brief, unmistakable, yet ever so unwelcome, twinge of pity which sparkled out from the corners of the eyes of her friends or her family or new acquaintances. To Ella, it was inexplicable, that torment which raged within her, so it was jarringly contradictory that it would be so detectable by anyone, and it was in vain that Ella attempted to cover up the symptoms. For anyone could clearly see the evidence of deeply profound, yet unexplained sadness. And it was these others who felt a gaping ravine of distance from Ella, a distance which could only be crossed if she could manage to bridge the gap. She'd been left to the cursory comfort of mere shallow acquaintance, of lost friends, missed lovers, and distant family. As if she had never stood a chance at that coveted intimacy of human closeness.

Facing the view out the back slider and seated on the reupholstered chair at the oak dining room table which had been present in the house her parents had shared, and then in the house in which her mother had lived alone, Ella's heart began to fissure. What started as a hairline fracture swept swiftly outwards like the fine filaments of a spider web, and, quite without warning, Ella suffered the violent, wrenching sensation of shattering. Eyes swimming, Ella found herself quite suddenly drowning under the insurmountable weight of a grief which had always been present and yet never mourned. 

As the wind continued to blow around her, as her nose continued to devour that smell of early autumn morning, Ella felt, finally, the weight of it all. The weight of everything. Helpless to stop them, violent sobs wracked Ella, animal sounds, and Cooper came up to offer comfort, pressing the edge of his cone into her leg. Through her blurred vision, Ella watched the pink smudge of sunrise deepening to coral. As tears cascaded like rain, Ella had the sudden, if vague, notion that her mother could hear her. This, however, was directly followed by a hollow and raw sensation which imparted that even if awakened by these sounds, her mother would not venture forth, and nor would she ask of it later. It was a hauntingly familiar sensation and it was this awareness of familiarity which dealt Ella the final blow, dragging excruciating sobs from her; the dog at her side began to whine miserably. 

Grief, sorrow, pain, they all melted together into the wrenching dread of awareness. Of a truth which had, like a poltergeist, followed Ella her whole life, wreaking havoc at every turn, which she could now, at last, begin to shed light on. Now, as the sky melted to blood red followed finally by the first golden shoots of sunlight bursting over the horizon, Ella realized what she had to face, what had fundamentally crippled her all these years. With shaking hands, she reached down into the cone and stroked the soft face of the dog. She became aware of the wet mess of tears and running nose and she absently swiped at her face with her shirt. As the sun continued in its unstoppable path up into the sky, Ella cried intermittently, as waves of awareness washed over her, each wave dragging her deeper under the weight of her neglected grief and pain. Each wave that threatened to stop that very beating of her heart.