PAINTED LOVE

THIRTY-THREE

loïse madden

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"Have you ever felt so low in life, so aimless, so lost? So desperate that you stop believing in all that could possibly be up there? That the angels, the gods, nature, universe, anything that could be causing you to feel this way and get better just feels like it's disappeared? Vanished, swooped away to some other planet, place, person who now gets the same feeling of emotional luggage that you've been carrying for the past time? 

Because I have. Or at least, that's how I see it. That's what's making me feel at least that tiny bit better about the situation. I like to believe that during some times, the angels leave you alone, set you free on your own feet to watch you fall and get up after. I believe that I'm carrying the emotions someone else used to feel. But now that that someone else is feeling better, their feelings get blown away by a gust of wind and they catch onto the first person they come across. 

Me. 

I'm in the deepest well right now, trying to find my own way out while leaving my pain in here. Trying to look for some sort of stairs, holes to put my hands and feet in, without anyone who can help me out of here. All on my own. 

I've never felt lonelier, even though I've never had this much people around me. To help me find the stairs, the holes. 

But they don't see it like I see it. My mother calls me everyday to check up on me, while she's grieving on her own. She tells me that this is fate, the universe. But I don't see it like that. I see it as the biggest mistake the doctors could have made when they said there was nothing they could do. 

My boyfriend tells me he understands how I'm feeling, he does everything he can to help me get out of this dark well quicker. But I don't know if I want to leave. What if I like it here? 

My friends want me to process everything at my own pace. They are sure of the fact that I'll get better soon, that everything will be just fine. Even though I know now that it won't be fine ever again. Everytime I think of what happened to my dad again, I'll feel the same anger build up as to why fate wasn't good to him. That anger will never leave me. 

But maybe it will take up less of my body in a while, when I'm starting to adjust to the darkness of this well, when I start to look for an escape. Maybe that's when I'll do anything to get out. 

I remember when my father would compare anything in my life to painting. He knew I liked to paint. When my cat died, he told me she had finished painting her life. Every single detail in her painting was so perfect, so beautiful that she didn't want to paint it anymore. She just wanted to leave it like that. Because it was perfect. Sometimes, had he said. Sometimes it's better to end things early, when they're still beautiful, than to exploit them until you don't even like them anymore. 

I had never understood it. I still don't. But I get it a little bit more now. 

My dad's painting could be compared to a tent in the middle of the most beautiful woods you could ever imagine. The leaves wouldn't be dark in fall, the trees wouldn't be bald during winter. It was always summer in his painting, in his life. The tent would be filled with all his favorite memories, people, things and ideas. 

My mom would be in there, our holidays together. And hopefully me, too. 

But without my dad, the tent wouldn't be as much fun to be in. I'd want to leave, go inside the woods to look for him.