One And A Half Years

One

A walk. the worst of worse to come.

I struggle to see. My rose-gold glasses forbid it, let me down once again. So I squint. Streetlights stretch and overlap, but Mom’s silhouette clears. Blonde hair, dark roots and loose curls fall on her black jacket, looking familiar. She perishes, my eyes readjust.

“It might be time for some new glasses.”

New glasses, just to see less. It’s always too bright, even when there’s no moon or sun and the clouds cover everything that’s not close. Someone painted this town yellow.

The doors fall shut quietly, but painfully.

“Ice cream?”

Always at the same place, every evening, with masks in our pockets and hats on. Mine pink, hers black. There could never be enough pink. Black’s not allowed, not in my room, not in my life. I want to see pink everywhere. I want to see.

The walk resumes, I tell Mom about the clouds and the yellow and she pushes herself to understand. When the ice cream’s gone, her hand finds mine, sticks, with my clouds serving as glue. Yellow paint oozes from where we’re connected.

Eight

A nightmare. The worst of worse to come.

Panting, sweating and shivering I stir awake. Mom was dead, buried beneath the wooden tiles of our living room. Dad was fine with it and my brother managed, only I cried. But I realize, almost immediately, that she’s sleeping. Just sleeping, in her yellow bed, chest rising and falling. And she’s dying, no she’s not. I reach for her nose and her breath falls on my index finger. my fingernails are long, smaller than hers.

Twenty-One

I could at least cry him that river.

The one my brother always told me to cry when I was screaming. With me on Mom’s lap and Dad’s hand on my shoulder, the main light would shine yellow. My brother, however, would sit on the couch a few feet away, playing video games on his IPad. Two and a half years older, blessed with the vision of becoming filthy rich and bigger than the boys who bullied him and the girls that found him disgusting. My high-pitched voice is annoying him, ripping apart his insides, filling his skull with my clouds. Perhaps because he couldn’t see them was it so difficult to understand that the yellow stains on his clothes burned. That I was on fire, day to night, night to day. Always burning in yellow flames.

Fifty

The camera on its tripod in my pink room chimes its dying words.

The sentence I was about to end, breaks in two. Silence. The silence after the storm of lively words spoken to a dead lens. I reach for the camera, graze along its skin to find the outlines of the battery slot. It clicks open, I empty it, free it of the chance to breathe again. A camera can’t run on a dead battery, everybody knows that.

I get up then, to unscrew it from the tripod. Rotating it with one hand, forgetting to support it with the other. And it falls, quickly. One second and it lies on the ground. The collision coinciding with a loud sound. A sudden breath, sucked into my lungs. The camera dies in front of me, its pink color cast vanishes. I worked hard to get that color cast right. And now the lens is cracked. And the yellow poison trapped inside is rising. My vision fogs with tears that can’t spill. Tears that would burn.

A camera can’t run on a dead battery. Few have seen it.

One-Hundred-And-Eighty-Eight

Hands sticky.

The juice of the orange drips onto my hand, between my fingers and onto the tissue we laid out. Olivia and I. Me and the first girl who understood. Because she’s counting too. She’s been counting for two years, even stopped counting once for a few seconds when she died from the bleeding on her wrist, but came back to life and resumed counting. And I know it’s true, because I felt it when we hugged and I cried into her arms. On my first day in prison.

White walls, too many to count. A light, wooden table. One bathroom. Stairs. And oranges in the fridge. I admitted myself to this prison willingly, but they trapped me inside.

Only pretending to let me go after a while.

After a few minutes of playing the piano, hours of cards and board games and seconds of Mom. The seconds I get of her when I lock myself in the bathroom and call her on the second phone I keep in my backpack when they ask to confiscate the first.

My cell is spacious. It includes a garden, many rooms with white walls and a door. The door that leads outside. But you can never leave, always stay yellow. They tell you that you will. That you get the chance to leave after minutes, hours and seconds. That this is the place where yellow fades. But when you try to leave, when Mom picks me up, drives me home, when you try, that’s when you realize. You realize your body’s here. But your head’s still there. With the oranges and white walls. More yellow than ever.

I’ve been captures by my own will. And now, I need to escape.

One-Hundred-And-Ninety-Nine

No twist so far.

Mom’s hand glides over the steering wheel with ease. Her head turns, hair that’s been hastily bleached gets caught in her jacket’s zipper. Even worse, the cup of ice cream she’d places on the passenger seat lunges forward and falls to the floor. Its content spills. Mom swears, rips her hair away from the zipper, but it’s too late. The car’s stained.

The drive isn’t long and I don’t feel my heartbeat like last time. It’s quiet in my rib cage. Only the car sounds, somewhere far away. I haven’t recovered from the four days I spent in prison. Escaped, yes. But could I ever forget?

The car halts and my seat belt catches me, straining my chest. Even though my heart isn’t beating abnormally, my head is still spinning. Up in the clouds somewhere. The car door next to me swings open and Mom, still upset over the ice cream she spilled, tells me to hurry, because we’re late again. It’s day two, the second time after one hundred and ninety nine days that I get to spill.

Mrs. Can gestures for me to sit in the comfortable, fuzzy chair and takes a seat in a similar one, opposite from me. The room’s not pink, but it’s pretty.

Seconds of silence and I start spilling. 

The worst walks, with worse to come. Nightmares. Crying that river, a camera can’t live on a dead battery and my hands, sticky. Prison, oranges, cameras, ice cream, all yellow. The paint spills from my mouth. She takes it, tastes it, makes art with it. 

And then she gives it a name. One that, when spoken out loud, sounds gray. But one that, for me, shines brighter than the sun, in the ugliest yellow one could imagine.

“Do you know what Depression is?”

Two-Hundred-And-Six

The first twist. The worst of better to come.

Spilling is good and addictive, better than talking, but Mrs. Can stopped the flow when she lied. About that name, because it certainly wasn’t mine. I have heard of it, the grayness, the black and white. I know it exists in dark corners with rats and mice. But I’m not gray. No, I am worse than gray. Gray isn’t bright, gray feels like your friend, gray means tired. I am not tired, Mrs. Can, I am burning. Gray people don’t catch. My flames are yellow and except for Olivia, there’s never been anyone to understand.

But Mrs. Can breaks the dam when she speaks again.

“We call this severe depression. It’s rare, but you’re not the only who suffers from it.”

Rare. So who else?

“Few. And unfortunately, it can only be treated with medication.”

Two-Hundred-And-Forty-Eight

Worse to come.

Going back in time must now be possible, how else would I be back in that same moment. Getting ice cream when the sun’s already hiding behind the houses. Oh right, I’m not. Katy takes the cup that’s so full of cream, you can’t even see the ice cream beneath. She gives it to Leila and reaches for her own. One scoop of cookie-dough. I’m holding a cup with the same design on it in both of my hands. Vanilla.

But I can’t see my ice cream that I know is yellow.

Unable to see color. Colorblind, is what nobody calls it. But what the pills have made me.

I staid colorblind for a while longer. Colorblind and scared and numb. I wondered if this was really it. I kept wondering, fearing. And then one day, a Saturday, something changed.

Three-Hundred-And-Ninety-Nine

Mad. I am furious.

I let go of the door and it crashes into its frame. Dad wants me to stop slamming doors, always has, but I don’t care.

My hands find the crown of my head and I pull hard on the strands roughly falling down my shoulders. Fuck! I want to yell and punch someone. I want to punch someone bloody until their skull is turned inward, but wait— no, I don’t want that. the red rage blurs into blue frustration. I’m upset now and the tears prickle in my eyes, urging to fall. I feel my face heating up. She doesn’t even come up to apologize. She used to always do that. Has everything changed already?

Mom wants to start working again. Live her life. The one she’s been putting on hold for me and my brother when he was diagnosed and she had to stay home to take care of him. And me. And now she wants to go. I want her to live, but I can’t let her go.

Isn’t she the threat I’m hanging by? Didn’t she throw me that lifeline?

Finally, the tears spill. They roll down my cheeks, many at once. They get caught on my lips and chin on the way down and I let them. I let them fall messily until I halt.

I switch perspectives, look at myself in the third person. Mrs. Can taught me how to.

And I realize that the tears aren’t burning down my cheeks. No, they don’t even hurt. No, I’m just crying. Crying salt-water. Not paint. 

Not fucking paint.

Four-Hundred-And-One

Better to come.

“That’s not considered short hair though, right?”, I say, glancing at my reflection in the mirror. The hair dresser keeps moving his hands through my hair, chuckling softly.

“I can assure you that it’s not.”

A firm answer, seasoned with another small laugh that calms my nerves. It’s my first time since early childhood taking off that much, but it feels good. Scary, but good. It’s new, but familiar. I suppress a smile.

Four-Hundred-And-Nine

Twist.

With a pair of silvery scissors in my hand and my head bent in an unnatural way, I stare intently at my reflection. Short, this time. Just above my shoulders. It’s uneven, but I don’t notice. A quick picture to see what it looks like from behind. Fine, it’s fine.

They say hair holds memories. And I agree. So I cut that shit off. It was sticky with paint anyway.

Four-Hundred-And-Ten

Spilling happens in all kinds of forms. It can take on the shape of my mother, a silhouette standing in the door frame, smiling helplessly when I’m crying. It can be my brother, tall and muscular, but actually just small. Or my friends, far away.

Or it can be be a color. Yellow.

My sight has mostly returned by now. I got better glasses. Dark-blue, more angular ones. Every Tuesday in Mrs. Can’s Office, I now spill. My colors used to be tinted. And then they were all gone, back when I was colorblind. I remember vividly, but I don’t imagine.

They’ve become pure again, I realize now.

I find myself liking that raw green in particular.

I think I saw green for the first time at the hair dresser. I saw it again with the scissors in my own hands.

But my favorite has got to be white. I feel white when I’m sitting alone, reading a book under that tree at the lake. Even when my pants get dirty and I feel bugs beneath me. I’m still white.

I was surprised to find that emotions have colors. Sounds strange, right? With the way I keep talking about them. But yellow is not a color. It’s not even a shade, like black or white. Yellow is not a color. It’s a thick, sticky substance that attaches itself to its host, painting their vision, everything they love, the color that would hurt the most.

It’s not supposed to be rolling down my cheeks. It’s not supposed to stain my brother’s shirt. Yellow is not supposed to be.

A camera can’t capture it. The only hint you could get would be through the eyes. The eyes are the gateway to the soul, people say. Again, agreed. When you look closely at pictures of me in my pink top and skirt, with my hair long and lips turned upward at an unnatural angle, you might be able to get a glance at my soul. Spray-painted yellow. The ugly kind.

A smile hides the yellow truth. Yellow like the teeth I hadn’t been able to brush. Too busy missing half the school year and making pink videos online. I’d wanted to be pink so badly. And I almost succeeded. To everyone in school, the girl with the pink clothes who always made these videos about her perfect life, was indeed perfect. Perfectly pink.

I was trying. Trying in the wrong places, however. It was tragic the way people couldn’t see, never looked closely. They never even made out the patterns of paint I burned into my left wrist and right leg. All they saw was pink. 

They saw what I showed them.

Five-Hundred-And-Forty

I went to school today. Didn’t come in late, didn’t leave early.

Now I’m home, laying in bed, reading. I’m wearing my angular, blue glasses. I’m seeing. It feels natural now. Looking and getting to see.

With better glasses and no clouds, everything is much closer. But even from afar I can see my friend’s faces. I hadn’t seen them in so long that it felt odd. 

But they too look free now. They might’ve been all along. But I always saw the paint running down their arms.

Now I don’t. There’s only skin. Raw, real skin.

I feel free today.

Free from Mom, who’s still Mom, but doesn’t hold my hand when I sleep anymore. Mom, who did throw me that lifeline, but wasn’t the one to pull me back to the shore.

Mom, who I will always be thankful to. But Mom, who needs to live her own life now.

And me, who’s got her own now. At thirteen, one and a half years later, I can finally stop counting the days since my death. And start counting the days since I lived.

When was that again?

One

A walk. With better to come.

My feet drag across the street. I’m slouching, not because of the burning in my lungs, but instead that nagging fatigue that’s been pulling on my limbs for days. The wind slaps my face like a whip as I make a sharp turn into my street. Finally. I breathe in deep. It’s not as rewarding to get back home however when my feet still ache and the burning hasn’t stopped. I wanted to get ice cream, but when I arrived the doors wouldn’t open and a small sign behind the glass told me the reason. Renovations, apparently. 

So you’d probably think now: that walk was for nothing.

All that body pain, just to go home empty handed.

And why did I even walk there in the first place? I could’ve taken my bike or the bus.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t, because I wanted it to be the same when I saw that place again.

The place that reminded me time and time again of the pressure, the clouds. Those glass doors that I would glance at, vision blurry, forehead clouded. Hands stained.

And now, today, for the first time in one and a half years I am able to see them.

These doors.

I might not have been able to open them, but when my hand reached out to push them open I was able to clearly make it out.

My fingers were shaking. Trembling with life.