Wes Anderson Pink

They said on the news this morning that it was the hottest summer on record, but it just started snowing. The phone  slipped from my ear a while ago, hit the tiles on its corner and slid to a stop. I don’t think I even moved to catch it. There is a tremor somewhere inside of me from a place where I keep things buried. I see the afternoon sun perched in the brilliant blue, but there are storm clouds rolling in with the snow. The phone started vibrating again at my feet, rumbling against the uneven tiles. That would be Mum with the news. She’ll have to wait. They’ll all have to wait. 

I can see the snow through the french doors in the garden, piling higher and higher. Each flake warping against the glass. I leave the phone behind and throw open the patio doors. 

Snow is swirling all around the garden but I’m sweating in my shorts and t-shirt. The pool glistens in the summer sun, but everything else is tinged with white. My pink chair is where it always sits, on the ledge of the pool, I liked to dangle my feet in the water. Billy picked that chair.

Reclaimed vintage, retro pink and I hated it. He sat there all summer the year before last. 

'But it’s Wes Anderson Pink.' He said when I mentioned that it smelt like Nan’s house. He smirked from behind a pair of wayfarers, a cigarette between his lips, baking in the sun with a trickle of sweat running down his chest. He started talking about film. He always talked about movies, compositions, cinematography. He was captivating when he spoke about what he loved. He was supposed to study it, but kept putting it off. 

Eventually I’d forget all about that stupid chair, I’d grown to like the way it looked next to the green of the grassy knoll and the chlorine blue of the pool. He was sitting in it by the pool the last time we spoke. I can see it now.

‘You’ll come back. You always do', he said from behind his black frames, foot dangling in the water. It was eleven in the morning, there was an empty martini glass next to the chair, and a fresh bottle of pills was next to him that he had used as chasers, a couple of them had fallen out onto the brick floor. He looked up at me expectantly. Waiting for me to concede like I had all the times before. I thought about throwing the glass at him, I thought about tipping his self assured ass off of that fucking chair and into the pool.

‘If you knew me at all’ I said, kicking the little bottle into the pool, he leapt from his chair to save his vice, ‘you’d know that was the one thing you could say that would make sure I wouldn’t’. 

His stuff was gone not long after that. His records, his clothes and colognes had left a part of the house bare, it took a long time to fill it again. It felt bittersweet in a way though. To finally be free of him. But he left the chair. It is just a chair after all. 

Now there is a pile of snow on it. 

I sat in it, expecting the cold to bite me through my shorts, but it didn’t, the metal frame had been in the sun for too long and was hot to the touch. The kids next door had one of those slip and slides, running in loops from the pool to the plastic slide and then slipping through the garden on their bare bellies back into the pool. Do they realise it’s snowing? 

The sky swirled with white and grey above me, but the sun is still so hot on my face. The strangest sensation, watching the snow melt on my finger but to feel nothing. It’s almost up to my knees, so I waded inside and closed the garden doors behind me. 

There was a lot left to say, but my pride had gotten in the way, I’m a Leo like that, and so I told myself:

‘We’ll talk when the dust settles, talk then, sometime soon'. 

Well, I kept sometime soon just out of reach and the words were always left until tomorrow. 

That damn phone is ringing again. I wish they wouldn’t call me. One conversation was enough. I don’t need to be asked by everyone, who just heard the news, how I am. I’m fine. Just caught in the net of the unsaid. Caught in the happy times, the bad times and the things I could have done differently that may have made a difference today. I should have done more to help him break the vicious cycle he had found himself in, but I needed to get out and taste the fresh breath of possibility again. I wanted to be something. 

The snow is rising quickly, already halfway up the door. It has barricaded me in. There are shadows creeping into the corners of the living room, hovering around the kitchen island.

Out of the blue, Billy sent me a message a few months ago. I was at a bar with friends and we laughed about his message 

‘Hey spunk, been a long time!’, then a second one a few hours later, ‘How r u?’ - Billy annoyingly spelt ‘are’ with an ‘r’ - we dug into the true motive of his messages, laughed and criticised his grammar all night. 

Tomorrow arrived with a chance for me to open up, but I am weathered these days by failed ventures and the juvenile emotions of the past were locked away somewhere unseen. Tomorrow was never destined to arrive. My friends and I eventually settled on the motive being because he was still thinking I’d come back. A band was playing over the speakers, there were blinking fairy lights wrapped around a giant faux moose head, at least I hoped it was faux, I held my soda to my mouth, took a big sip and declared my repulsion for Billy and that part of my life that could have been about someone else, like a character in one of Billy’s Wes Anderson movies. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, an educator, a bit of a cruel one at that, like the old Victorian teachers with the canes. 

I realised now after watching the snow reach the top of the garden doors and plunging me into darkness, that he was reaching out for help. I suppose it must have been hard for him in a way, when each day returned to him with more of my silence.

I left him to fight his battles alone, forever running on a wheel that spun between hazy highs and manic lows, circling around and around and around. 

My head was in my hands. The room is stifling. I switched the air con on, but it filled my lungs as if from a paper bag. The cool took my face in its embrace and kissed my skin gently, something the snow wouldn’t do. I don’t owe him anything - didn’t, except for a kindness, and perhaps respect for our time together, but I didn’t give him that. Should I have? Maybe I held onto a grudge too strongly - how does that saying go? 

Cut your nose off to spite your face. 

My phone is ringing again. I am awake, but I don’t answer. 

They’ll tell me there is nothing I could have done, but they have to say that. 

I can see us clearly in the dark. Making love on the couch, one of Billy’s movies playing in the background. 

I wish I had replied. 

Would things be different if I had? Two seconds is all it would have taken. Could I have held his hand and helped him break the wheel? 

I cradled my knees into my chest and buried myself. 

The six o’clock news is on, the reporter in his pinstripe suit said today has been the hottest day in fifty years. It’s still snowing outside.