eggshells
After years of fighting, Loretta had let it go. The perfectionist in her had cringed as she stepped across the uneven floorboards of her craftsman bungalow’s entryway for a final time. The desired dopamine hit had pecked irritatingly at her left and right temples, coaxing her with cries of “just fix this one last thing!” But she had stuck to her word. Like her dismantled marriage, the home begged for just as much attention in its rapid beginnings as it did in its fragmented ending.
Sitting in the small windowsill of her now, fourteenth floor studio, Loretta sighed as her sister Josephine unpacked boxes around her. To her sister’s question of how she was doing, Loretta thought she’d feel better. She traced the rim of her coffee mug, searching carefully for her response.
“I feel strange,” Loretta answered, “like I’ve taken a step backwards.”
Josie stopped her shuffling through one of the moving boxes near her sister’s feet. “Maybe it’s not a step backwards but just a step back, so you can see clearly. It’s only a three month lease. You’re not stuck here”
Loretta nodded. She turned her gaze back to her temporary home. The cupboards were crooked, the bathroom door didn’t shut all the way, and the ceiling had mismatching tones of eggshell. A control-freak’s nightmarish challenge.
Josie’s eyes followed her sister’s to the ceiling. “You’re not painting.”
“No,” Loretta agreed. “I think I’m done fighting to make things fit that just don’t.”
Josie nodded. Quietly, she wrapped her arms around her sister’s neck, kissing each temple gently as if to further encourage the letting go. “I’ll make us some more coffee.” She disappeared behind a stack of tall boxes into the narrow, beat-up kitchen.
Loretta turned her gaze back out to the bustling streets, hungry with new stories. She wondered which of these strangers would become her friends, her enemies, which restaurants would make the food the way she liked, if she could truly get used to peeing with the door open, if her ex-wife was right in her needing to loosen up a bit, and if she was meant to find belonging in these things that didn’t fit.
Or if, by chance, that itchy, gnawing, nagging of a tune from her inner song was onto something; that maybe there was something more than the carbon copy floor plan of a life that her ex too willingly replicated. If maybe she didn’t truly need to change the cadence of her heart pattern, or even the color of this ceiling, but instead that she needed this great step-back of separation, to finally push her one step closer to finding a place, an environment, a trusted circle that just felt like rest.
-b
June 17, 2020