Grieving

      When I close my eyes, I can feel the shroud of my 28-year-old body wilt away and reveal a ten-year-old girl in a safety pinned wedding dress on the porch of a cabin in DeQueen, Arkansas. The gown was ivory because I insisted on a wedding dress that was not white. I watched while my mother helped my cousin put on his little suit and my grandmother picked out my first dance music. It had just rained, and the bubble around the house was still a muted gray, but the light screaming through it made it seem illuminated. I was young, and I was marrying my grandfather. 

      Pick up your jaw—it wasn’t a real wedding. Call it a family playing into their eldest daughter’s delusions for a joyful memory. I had always been obsessed with weddings. I had always been obsessed with love. It makes sense: I was raised by a dollhouse family and felt like I had to use all my gorilla glue whenever they cracked. I wanted someone to glue all the places I felt like I was broken. I wish someone could go back in time and tell that little girl to stop looking for marriage. Or a wedding. Or love. If she stopped relying on it then, God knows my early twenties would have been a lot easier. 

– 

      I now owned a Free People dress that looked an awful lot like the “wedding dress” I wore that day, but that’s the only remaining resemblance. I have lived 18 years since then. I was anxiously awaiting a call notifying me of my grandfather’s death. I sipped my wine while delaying the inevitable. I loved him. But I would be damned if I had to go to his funeral. I sat my drink down and got up from my chair. The air in my house felt still like a sanctuary, like a chill had just taken refuge from an even crueler world outside. I wanted some warmth. The box under my floorboards was the catalyst for all of my compartmentalization. It was so dusty and the top of the cardboard bent in a way where the box could never fully close. That irked my brain. I don’t know why I was searching through this. I wished actively while I was shuffling that I would stop. My eyes darted across words from illegible letters and pleaded to stop recognizing handwriting. I saw my father’s eyes in polaroids and photos of my mom in college. She will never know just how similar we looked when I was that age.

      I hadn’t talked to either of my parents in almost ten years and three months. This is the first time I had done the math though. I worked my way through my first two years of college and then dropped out so I could become a florist. I wanted to do weddings. 

      I hated fixating on my relationship with my parents. It felt sticky to me. They had taught me that I was a product of the things and people that loved me, but I always felt like I existed as a whole new person every time I woke up. My eyes were evidence to the contrary, as they belonged to my father first. And I had my mother’s unrelenting attitude. I guess nothing comes from nothing. 

      As I sifted through the papers and the ribbons lost from baby shoes and the cut out photographs, I noticed outlines of flowers within them. My sister’s hair hung like lilies of the valley and each of my brother’s girlfriends all glinted like snapdragons. The mementos sat like dried rose petals I wished to have kept from my childhood congratulatories. The contents of the box laid in front of me like the bones of a haunted house. Like the hearts that bleed midway through writing a poem— like someone must have died here.

      To all interested, it should be known that I no longer work with flowers. They never lived long enough for me. That and I couldn’t afford my own shop for longer than one lease period. There were times I desperately wanted my mother’s advice, but I made a commitment to be on my own, so the phone stayed unused. The shop closed. I got my associates degree from my college and settled to be an insurance broker. I was engaged. Called it off. I live with my best friend in a house off the coast of St. Joseph in Chicago. And every time I feel like my head is feeling a little lighter, it tends to find its way back to a white noise machine setting that knows how to brand parts of my life as to whether or not they fit into my created identity. 

      The shrill ring of the phone woke me up from my daze. I put the box back under the floorboards, sans one photo of me in an ivory wedding dress. I’m holding the hand of someone from outside the frame. I pocketed that one. 

– 

      The ring of condensation on the wooden countertop left me fixated. I was freezing cold in my black sweater that hugged my collarbone. It was a little too small for me, but I didn’t have any actual black clothes to wear to a funeral. A rhythmic change in the bar’s jazz band made my head shake and I threw it back and then my drink along with it. 

      This was my drink fifth. My think. My fifth drink I think. 

      Maybe I stopped counting. 

      The light drizzle outside brought out a kink in my hair—a wave my mother always hated. No one in my family knows where it came from; everyone else’s hair seems to follow the natural bend of gravity. I straightened every inch on my head before I saw my parents. I thought that maybe they would see me and think that I had successfully managed to age without their eyes on me. Eyes felt heavy. My eyes were heavy. I was definitely getting older.

      I always remember that I’m aging the day before today. And then I forget. Consciously. I remembered today that that fear extended to my parents. Time is a thief. Time is also my parents. Not slowing down. Running behind me. I try to remind myself that this is not a breakaway: in order for me to be running, they would have to be chasing me. Scraping the pavement hoping to catch some skid marks of my sneakers that I’m trying so desperately to skate away on. But they aren’t. A retired phone line requires both parties to become deserters. 

      When I look behind me, they’re weeping at the space between us, and for a moment, I’m a child in their arms, and that child is also me and both of us are ever-conscious of the fact that time will not stop for either of us. But I already forgot about that. Yesterday, I was dying. Today, I’m not going anywhere. 

      The Church was echoey. I keep replaying moments from the day in my mind. Every second was a reminder that I used to have a grip on something—anything. And then I turned slippery. 

      I dropped my drink. 

      “Oh my stars, more careful, please.” 

      Her voice hit my ears before I turned to look at her eyes. Her wrinkles surrounded her smile and her head was tilted to look at me. 

      “Dear, are you alright?” she let a maternal tone spill out of her mouth. I grimaced and stayed silent. 

      She took a three inch notepad out of her purse and followed with a precise yellow pen. Her left hand danced across the paper, reflecting the light off her gold wedding band onto her white hair.

      “I am giving you my email address. I know that no one uses those anymore, but in case you need anyone to call and help you tonight, please let me know. You’re not from here, I know.” “I am actually,” I cut her off. 

      “Well,” she composed her shock and ruffled her cardigan. “Where do you live?” I hit the countertop and tried to get the bartender’s attention; the old woman’s note had the strong urge to be crumpled up in the pocket of my blazer. 

      “Okay, lady.” 

      Too encumbered with my need for another cosmopolitan to care about any of her old nonsense, I didn’t see that she moved two seats closer to me. 

      “I’ll leave you alone, sweetie.” 

      Only she didn’t leave me alone. Leaving me alone would imply leaving. She just dragged her eyes back forward, sipped her drink, and resumed her subtle and insistent head bobble that induced such anger in me. 

      “You know what it is? Because I’ll tell you what it is. I am from here, but I’m not from here. I think I’m from a different place. But I’m not really. I just—I don’t recognize it.”

      She held her tilted eyes on me, and for the first time in my recent memory, I couldn’t contain myself in my manufactured safety walls. Something inside of me was screaming ‘give yourself to her.’ 

      So I told her. 

      I told her about the funeral. I told her about my house. I told her about the flowers. I told her about my new job. 

      I told her about my mother. The games we used to play. The aprons she used to sew me. The flowers we used to plant. I told her about my father. The way that he would listen to the songs I sent him. They way he would leave the house after arguments. The way that he would cook each of us the exact dinner that we wanted on any given night. 

      I rambled about two hundred different ‘If only they had’ and ‘If only I hadn’t’ sentences. The story whittled its way back to high school and the last of the choices they chose to choose before I chose to leave. My ex-boyfriend. His missed phone calls. My missed birth control. A pregnancy. A hypothetical daughter. And then, of course, the end of that hypothetical daughter and the end of my relationship with my parents. 

      “She knows why I did it.” The old lady’s eyes had grown sadder. “She is up there right now with my Pops understanding exactly why I did it. Her name was going to be Imogene before I decided…” 

      I drank. 

      “My mom fucking hated that name. You think she would’ve been happy that there’s no little Imogene running around her house and stealing all her fucking clothes.”

      The only way I knew how to mourn was through smiling. If I smiled any harder, my eyelid dams would break and water would flood my entire cheek. 

      “She could’ve stolen all of my clothes.” 

      The rib bones protecting my heart shattered and pierced it. My instructions for making my parents proud got lost in the mail and I wanted to find it and lick the envelope to find any lingering taste of innocence. All I wanted to do was have ten-year-old me in front of that barstool. In her ivory dress. Waiting to stage a wedding. Waiting to have a family. Waiting to hug her grandfather. Waiting. I would give you every flower bouquet in the entire world. Waiting didn’t always feel like helpless predestination. 

      “I’m done.”

      I broke. I couldn’t fix me. 

      “Thank you,” I touched the lady’s shoulder. “You don’t know how much you’ve helped me. I’m sorry, but I have to go.” 

      “Can you get home alright?” 

                        home. 

      “What’s your name?” I asked the three duplicates of her standing in front of me. “My name is Charlotte,” she said to me. 

      I must be completely obliterated because I would bet the bartender’s life on the fact that she just said my own name. 

      “No shit,” I stumbled. “That’s my name.” 

      She smiled softly at me and whispered, “Let me know if you need anything, Charlotte.”

– 

      I picked my feet up each time I walked so I wouldn’t make skid marks on my loafers from the asphalt. The afternoon heat didn’t let me forget how many sunburns I had as a child, blistering and peeling until my new layer of skin had the courage to show itself. Even now, raw skin boiled underneath my funeral clothes, one-too-many shots deep. I was wasted and unfiltered. 

      Jacaranda trees lined the streets. Broken purple blooms fell off the wayward side of the branches and were wiped off the windshields of passing cars like discarded children’s toys. I vaguely entertained a few cursing drivers and shocking honks before I obeyed and entered the sidewalk. Past Magnolia Street. Over the River Jetty. The ground surprises me with each crack and bump in the cement. I turned the corner and tried to stiffen my legs so that the little boy on the front porch of the house I’m passing doesn’t run inside to hide from a bent-over spider woman of doom. I’ve passed 2370 Woodruff Avenue. Flashes of the last birthday I had at Fairview Park. My dog eating the cupcakes and my balloon flying away. 2382 Woodruff Ave. The house that had the tire swing. If I had a lap big enough to crawl into, no one would suspect that I was anything more than a very tall child. 

      After miles of stumbling through dollhouse streets, the lap presented herself to me. I turned my entire body to my left in an awkward shuffle that began with my thighs. I was home for the first time in ten years. 

      The wooden pillars were bending to the wind, and the porch swing was unhinged from the top of the awning. It may have been the drinks whispering in my ear, but the chill started singing through the chimes and the tunnel of my front door. A minute passed. Still, I waited. The wind was blowing the Jacaranda flowers on my front walkway. I watched them fall. 

      When I tell the story of my parents, they are characters in my story. Mother. Father. The hatred for those words is so sweet. But the moment I utter the word Mom I fall to my knees again, grasping at her ankles. 

      The front of the house is still. Sacred. I hadn’t stayed for the funeral reception because that would require confronting the loss I hadn’t accepted yet. And of course, a confrontation. I felt a tear fall out of my eye—but it wasn’t an interruption; it functioned more as motivation to run and pick my neighbor’s tulips. They had bushels of them and five flowers would not be missed. Tulips in my hand caused my eyes to dart across the street once more to another garden. I ravaged ten roses. I traveled as a conquistador and grew my collection. Ivy. Dahlias. Peonies. Daisies. Hydrangeas. My arms looked like a float at the Rose Parade. I laid them on the grass in front of my house and went to work. 

      I switched the daffodils with the rosebuds and weaved the ferns between each chrysanthemum. I braided the thorns into the bouquets and let the snapdragons travel up the steps. I left the birds of paradise on the wooden railing to keep a watchful eye on my sister. I painted all that I knew how to do. The tears that traced my cheeks must have been made of light because the sunflowers leaned towards me instead of the sun. I raced and ranted and placed and planted and drizzled leaves where there were holes and drew petals out from each bud so each was in full bloom and I settled each flower into its home. 

      I stepped back. And it was beautiful. 

      Wanting to spell out a letter with the garden that I grew, I pulled a sticky note from my pocket and took the cap of my eyeliner off with my teeth. I scribbled,

                        Mom + Dad, I don’t know if you still live here. Give me a call if you do. If not, keep the                             flowers. I’m drunk and this is the only address I know. 

      I left it on the porch swing and walked myself to the park until I was sober enough to drive. By the time I checked my home phone, I had three missed calls. I felt the presence of something creeping up my back and into the roots of my hair, making it stand up all down my arms. 

      I dialed them back.

Anna DiCrisi is a sophomore studying Creative Writing. Her favorite thing to write is poetry, but her love for fiction is growing everyday since she first seriously began exploring it this spring semester in her fiction workshop class. She hopes to always write and eventually have her own collection of poems and short stories.