April Showers [Unfaithful Rewritten]

3 | so cold

3
so cold

Certain days were sour from the crack of dawn.

It started from waking up on the wrong side of the bed; realizing that it wasn't a bed at all, but a sofa; gritting your teeth at the knowledge of why it wasn't your bed.

You got up, ignoring the pale orange glow that coated your windows, that you had loved every other morning because it had reminded you of the shirt your husband had worn the day he proposed to you. The color that was his favorite and therefore now, filled your stomach with dismay instead of love.

Love. It was an elastic word, used so frequently that its meaning was nearly weightless. Yet it carried so much power, a word every relationship crumbled under unless uttered.

I remembered the first time Nate had said he loved me. We were at the tender age of seventeen, when we thought we had learned everything there was to learn, and that carrying around with a word like love made us special — on a different level than all other high school relationships. We were still together, so most people thought that we did have that special something — that spark. Up until yesterday, I would've smiled and agreed with them.

I closed my eyes. No. I could at least have a shower first, before this started.

Peeling myself off the couch was an experience involving bouts of soreness, a symphony of various cracking bones, and regret over picking the damn thing out of all the places I could've slept elsewhere. Vaguely, I remembered crossing the guest bedrooms off my list because  I didn't like their foreign feel. Now, I was mentally kicking myself.

My instincts drove me from the uncomfortable (at least to sleep on) sofa in the family room and up the staircase. My body led tiredly sleepily towards my room, the master bedroom, but only managed a few steps before my brain realized just what the hell it was doing.

I bit my lip. The next closest bathroom with a reasonably sized shower — I turned abruptly and headed towards the opposite end of the hallway. I opened the door of the second to last room, slipping inside.

Celia's room.

It was overwhelmingly pink; the fiery shade of pink that sometimes didn't strike me as truly pink, but rather closer to bright red. That was Celia's reasoning for why she liked it so much — she didn't have to choose between red or pink. She could have both.

Her room wasn't as filled to the brim as usual, however there were obvious corners of games and toys sticking out from various boxes and even under her bed. Her desk was full of crumpled, wrinkled papers, all marked up by telltale red ink. I sometimes thought that she intentionally got worse grades just to see her beloved color scribbled all over her papers, but every time I brought it up to Nate he would just shake his head and say that was silly. Besides, even if she did, she was only seven, and it was a refreshing (Nate's words, not mine) shift in personality from our younger and more mature Joseph.

I remembered that I still had to pick them up from their friend's houses, so I hurried into the connecting bathroom, picking up a magenta towel on the way. I was grateful for the foresight I'd had when we were in the midst of picking a house to have the children with their own bathrooms, although I couldn't say I expected it to come in handy the way it did.

The thought revamped my sour mood, and it didn't wash away like the rest of the dirtiness did under the water.

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