After I wiped my tears of frustration from my cheeks, I grabbed Kendrick’s luggage to load it in the back of the SUV. The truck was so tall, and the bags were heavier than I expected. I fumbled with the largest one, but as I tried to save it, it fell directly on my foot. Crouching down, I seethed in pain and bitterness.
While my foot was tender, my gentle prodding of it seemed to indicate that there was no acute damage. It hurt, yes, but it was manageable pain. I stood up, renewed with angry vigor to attack the task at hand.
Grunting, I managed to throw the final suitcase into the back and slam the door down. Satisfied with my success, I turned to walk back to the elevator, taking tender steps as I did.
I wasn’t ready to go back outside.
In fact, I was in a worse emotional state than I had been when I left. However, the apartment had plenty of distractions for me.
I reached for the button, but I couldn’t bring myself to push it. Tears began to form in my eyes again, stinging and unrelenting. Through my blurry vision of unshed tears, I looked for a way to escape, and there it was. The elevator was right next to a door that led to the apartment’s emergency exit, so I turned to that.
Despite the pain, I was grateful I chose the stairs. The ache in my foot began to ease as I moved. More importantly, each step up helped me feel like I was creating physical distance between myself and the past that gnawed at me.
My relationship with Joseph had caused unintentional ripples in my life. I didn’t blame him, because the choices after him were all my own, it was just curious how it all linked together.
My insecurity from his sudden disappearance had inadvertently led me to Robert.
Our unplanned pregnancy with Nyx had thrust me into marriage and motherhood much earlier than I had intended. My own parents disowned me for my sinful pre-marital promiscuousness, and Robert became the only person I had. His career took us all over the world, but the frequent moves inhibited me from developing roots and connections to other people.
I ended up in a place I never intended to be and had little support in processing how to make it my own.
Art and creation became my coping mechanisms, the place I could pour my feelings into. When a project was done, my feelings evaporated with it. Maybe it wasn’t true healing, but it had saved my heart from drowning in grief, especially after we lost her.
Evelyn Grace Masterson.
We had her name picked out. I looked forward to no longer being the only girl in our family, and I had already decorated the nursery in frills and lace. The hospital bag was ready, and I was more prepared than I had been for either of the boys.
At thirty-two weeks, a car accident changed everything.
Losing my daughter was devastating by itself, but I also lost my belief in my marriage. The combination of the two sent me into a spiral of grief and shame. Art had saved my life, giving me a place to manifest all the darkness inside me, to take it out of my heart and put it on display.
I created The Colors of Grief series to channel my emotions in a certain space. Inside my art studio I could be distraught, so that outside of it I could be a mom.
I had taken pictures throughout my pregnancy. Shots of our positive test, the pregnancy announcement, the crib in the finished nursery, my maternity shoot, and many others. They were vibrant, happy pictures but deleting them was an erasure that wouldn’t help me heal. Which is why I kept the images, but I couldn’t leave them the way they were. The happiness was too suffocating.
I had massive canvas prints made of a dozen images and began painting over them. Grey, blue, and black. The bleak overlay started subtly a quarter of the way down the canvas. Watery and distorted, the muted colors drained the happiness away from the original image. The darkness intensified until the bottom of the image was nothing but a black puddle.
As I painted, tears made my mascara run in a similar fashion, dark watery lines that heralded my emotional distress, and made my face the secret canvas that no one saw.
Except for Robert, and only one time.
He had come into the studio once after I started and was horrified by what I was doing. Not just horrified but offended by my project. He slammed the door in a rage as he left the room and never came back in there while I was working.
Even his anger inspired me, though.
I took a sledgehammer to the bottom corner of each piece, making the brokenness a full physical manifestation of the art.
When it was done, I submitted it to an art show in France, and was surprised when someone offered to buy it during the event. I hadn’t intended to sell it, as it was a deeply personal creation, so I gave them an astronomical price.
The buyer readily accepted, and it was an unintentional moment of healing to let them go. The blackest part of my sadness was taken, and only manageable grief remained.
Maybe that was what I needed now. To create something to help me let go of the past and embrace my own future. To strip away the layers of pain and intentionally design my life.
An idea began to take root, visuals of violent demolitions flashing in my mind. As I reached the second floor, I decided to exit and retrieve one of my cameras. I began pulling them out of their bags to check battery life and memory space. I hadn’t used them much since Lila’s death and didn’t remember which was which.
I didn’t really have time for a new artistic healing project with the apartment renovations I needed to be done. However, there was a lot of symbolism in taking this space and making it my home, the way I needed to make my life my own.
I found a camera that would be sufficient and proceeded upstairs, the tenderness of my foot forgotten in my eagerness to start anew. When I exited the stairs, I paused to stand in the doorway, looking into the kitchen. Raising the camera to my eye, the lens gave me a visual tunnel to focus on, and a new perspective to see.
Twisting the lens, the cabinets blurred and sharpened, the distortion let my mind imagine their destruction. Removing the doors and having them gape open, sanding the old varnish off every surface, renewing them with whatever vibrant aesthetic my heart desired. A process I must do to myself. Opening emotionally, sanding away my pain, and choosing the form I wanted my future to have.
Click.
The sound of the shutter eased my mind, imagining the changes I wanted to make through the focused sight of the lens. The forest green carpet was a blanket of darkness that I could physically rip away to remove my emotional shrouds. Giving the offensively pink bathroom tile the sledgehammer treatment would mirror what I needed to do with the walls I had built to survive my marriage.
Click. Click. Click.
As the promising renovation of my life and my apartment began to form in my mind, concerns also began to form.
Time was of the essence since I only had a month to do the major restoration projects. Money was also an issue. The pressure of balancing that into my budget made me chew my lip as I continued to snap pictures.
However, the biggest concern of all was actually space. The apartment only has two bedrooms, but I have two sons, and I did not want my new life to accidentally isolate one of them from my home. While Nyx had his own apartment, I wanted him to have a space here too. Sleeping on a couch just wasn’t enough for me, nor would it be for him.
With almost a hundred pictures taken, I put the camera down on the kitchen island. My emotions had appropriately pivoted from focusing on my past to my future. I felt good enough to head back outside, despite any lingering worries.
Coming outside again, I noticed the crowd had slightly dissipated. My eyes scanned the crowd, and as my gaze lingered on a grey suit jacket, I realized that I was unconsciously looking for Joseph.
It wasn’t him.
I wanted to feel relieved by his absence, but part of me was disappointed not to find him here. Odd that I secretly yearned for a glimpse of the face that awakened so much pain in me.
I pushed away my disappointment and mingled with the crowd until it was time to take Kendrick to the airport. As we drove away, everyone waved goodbye and quite a few people shed tears. He had been a hallmark of the community for fifty years. The epicenter of a support system that he was now leaving. I understood the feeling of being uprooted, and his roots were much deeper than mine ever were.
“How are you doing, Kendrick?” I asked, realizing that he was going through just as many changes as me.
He took a deep breath, “I am sad to leave what I know, but I am happy to move on.”
This sentiment resonated within me too. I was incredibly happy to carve out a more authentic life for myself, but also sad to split the foundation of our family in the process.
“Two truths,” I stated, referring back to his wisdom.
“You’re a fast learner, Tiff,” he said with a grin, “We are going to be fine.”
I gave him a half smile, my doubts eating away his reassurance before it could take root.
“What’s on your mind?”
I shook my head, as if to knock my thoughts loose. What wasn’t on my mind? That was the real question. There were so many things co-existing in my brain that I couldn’t even begin to articulate which one was bothering me.
“You can’t fool me, Tiff,” he chuckled, most likely assuming that my shake was a tacit indication that it was nothing, “I was married to Lila for fifty-two years. I know the look of a woman that is stewin’. Out with it.”
“I’m grateful for the apartment,” I began carefully, “but I’m worried about how to make Nyx feel like it’s a place for him too, since he won’t have a room.”
A low ‘mhmmm’ reverberated out of Kendrick’s chest as he nodded at my words.
“Talk to Oscar and Bruno,” he said, “they drew up a plan for me while Lila was in chemo. I was going to build a guest house on top of unit four so the kids could come visit her. They already have the plans and permits for it.”
A grateful sigh left my chest as a smile painted itself across my face. I immediately loved the idea.
“You just might be the smartest man alive,” I said laughing, but not jokingly.
“Remember that the next time your mentor gives you advice you don’t like,” he said with a knowing wink.
Oscar and Bruno were the second-floor tenants of unit two, where they operated their construction business. My mind began to mull over this idea, and I mentally added a trip to talk with them to my future agenda.
“How do you know Joseph Kavinsky?” Kendrick asked suddenly, which immediately pulled me out of my thoughts.
“Uhm…” I began uncertainly, “He’s Robert’s divorce attorney.”
A confused grunt from Kendrick made me chuckle, but then he said, “That’s not what I expected. You met him during the divorce meeting?”
The specificity of his question put me on edge. I didn’t want to lie to Kendrick, but I didn’t want to tell him that Joseph and I had a history.
“Not exactly,” I said apprehensively, “We went to the same university and had classes together. But—but it was really a long time ago.”
“Interesting,” he said, absently.
“It’s not really that interesting,” I said, annoyed that my interaction with Joseph had caught his attention.
“You know that picture you took of Lila and I?”
The abrupt topic change caught me off guard, “Which one? I took quite a few of you two together.”
“All of them,” he said simply, as if I could remember every image.
“I don’t remember all of the individual pictures, but I do know that I love the way you looked at Lila in all of them.”
A knowing smile crossed his face, as if that was the intention of his question all along.
“It’s interesting,” he started, but stopped to
briefly catch my eyes as I drove, “because Joseph looks at you the way I looked
at Lila.”
Comments (21)
See all