I opened the door to my garage. Everything was as I left it more than a month ago when I left that painting on her doorstep. The same space heaters, the same paints sitting in a wagon, the same everything. It was like I stepped back in time for a bit. I sifted through old canvases, worn and cracked from the constant changes of temperature.
I hadn't been here in a while. Painting took a backseat while Emma rode shotgun. Now I guess I have the time again.
I wanted to remember how I felt before too many missing shades piled up. I wanted something tangible, something I could see. I started by reaching down for some color.
I started with the day it happened. I remembered how I felt more like it was a nightmare than it was two days ago. I reached down and chose the color black.
There, in the middle of the painting, I started with a black blob. It was one cell of a memory: dark, but permanent. I added rough textures to it, like it was getting ripped apart from the inside.
Then, surrounding the black fell a smoky mix of dark and light grey. I tried to make it look like how I felt now: confused and hollow. I felt like I was walking through a thick fog and like I was the fog itself. I felt like I was floating above the solid ground, not able to hold onto anything. I felt like I was lost, unable to see clearly. I filled most white space with that fog. I mixed smaller black orbs underneath the grey mist, trapped by the memory that held them in.
I looked at it again and went back to the black center. I formed small jagged lines growing out of the black circle. The shape reminded me of a neuron in my brain. And neurons are connections. I connected the neuron branches to different points in the fog of grey I drew before. There, I thought, that's how I feel. Lost to everything else, but still connected to her.
I brought the painting inside so that it wouldn't get damaged by the cold. I passed by my dad, who saw it in my hands.
"What's that?" he asked.
About to lie and say it was nothing, I decided to give him at least a little bit of a clue. "It's just something I'm trying so I can get back into the swing of things," I said.
"Can I see it?"
I looked at it again. It was accurate, but it was dark. "Only when it's done, sorry," I said as I ran back upstairs with it.
I closed my curtains and found her notebook on my bed. I put the accompanying envelope away in a drawer. The notebook had Creative Writing written on the cover. Directly on the inside there were study guides, schedules, and small little notes. Everything was hopeful and encouraging for her first semester at a new school.
The writings started on the twelfth page. The first couple were about her day, about adjusting to life, and about any little thought she had in her head.
She wrote in one of her pages, It's my senior year of high school and I celebrated by moving to a place where I knew no one. Be careful to not confuse that last sentence for a pile of bullshit. The two are shockingly similar.
I tried to find the day she first talked to me as I was skipping classes or the time we went on our gas station adventure. I wondered what she might have written about the first time we kissed or went stargazing.
But I stopped myself.
"Wait for the shades to pass," I said quietly.
I wasn't sure how it would feel to have the shades pass or how I knew how many had to pass before I could read further, but she trusted me to know when it was right. It had to be the right time and now was not the right time.
I closed the notebook and placed it in the top drawer of my desk. I thought about what I used to do at this desk. It was where I wrote Emma that letter when I royally fucked up. I tried to find her for almost a week. I remembered how I couldn't sleep, or maybe how I forced myself to stay awake. Late at night was always when I got my best ideas, and I knew I needed all the ideas I could get.
I heard my mom yelling my name downstairs and realized it was late enough to have dinner. I knocked on the wood of my desk and closed the drawer. It was then that I started to understand it all. It was then when it truly felt like our time together was over.