As a child I was constantly
sticking my fingers in sockets and trying to figure out if
grief had its own color
So my mother sat me down on the
sofa and took out the Pantone book, paged through it for an hour
until we found the blues. There, I said, that one, and
pointed to cerulean. Oh honey, my mother replied,
That’s not grief. That’s just a paint swatch and it will never amount to all
the pain in your heart.
Sometimes I feel the urge to go
wade out into the lake after filling my pockets with
stones, but then I remember my father
and how he wore his grief like a too-tight sweater,
something given to an awkward child by a grandmother who doesn’t
even know the right size, so I take the stones back out of
my pockets and I place them on his grave
instead.
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