Colors remembered

Forest Green was her favorite color. As a kid anytime I asked my mother that was the answer, never seafoam or lime but forest green. Ironic I think since she wasn’t much of a fan of the forest in general. Something about that dark color, that hint of something…

I don’t talk about my mother much, and her suicide, because it hurts so much more than my father’s death. My father fought, he tried, he wanted to be here. To stay. He lived a month and 5 days longer than her in horrific pain but she left me. She chose to abandon me, to never read the letter I wrote saying I wanted us to have a relationship. 

They both had hazel eyes, my parents, but Mom’s had flecks of green where Dad had bits of gold on the edges. Where they had dark hair and olive skin I was the little blue-eyed toe-head with skin that burnt on contact with the sun. Two months before my father’s diagnosis we sat together in his yard around the fire, he was telling me how beautiful I was when I was born (then corrected it to am), how I was the most beautiful baby. 

My father never told me his favorite color, but I’d always ask. He may have said blue at one point, but I could be fabricating that memory. 

Regardless, when I think of him it’s always in greens. Greens of the leaves in the forest, of the water swirling in the gorge where we’d go when I was little. Sometimes it’s the pines in contrast to the orange-yellow-red of the fall. Of my birthday, October, when the hillsides come alive for a moment before they go bare. 

In the spring it was the bright greens you see on the buds in the trees, especially against the gray landscape that is most of spring in New England. This spring where I remember growing tomatoes last year, talking with him about the days getting longer and the hope that’s always there. 

Except when it isn’t. When the hope is gone and there is no chance at redemption or reunification, and it’s times like these where I sit and wait and pray to whatever god might be listening to Please, Please make the sun less bright. Let the gray skies just take over for a while so I can sit in quiet without the feeling I’m wasting my life.

I took the time to write this out, so that’s less of a waste right?