Venetian Blinds

Author's Note: This is a companion piece to "Candles" and is intended to be read after it.

Your eyes were always rather appraising, like Venetian blinds at half slant. I think I might remember you best for that- your appraising, bright eyes. We used to have staring contests and I never won.

Never.

You were also so straightforward, in a quiet kind of way. Brilliant and conniving and everyone’s darling. Apparently, these qualifications are quite dangerous anymore.

Driving back tonight, all I could see in the darkness of the highway were the headlights whipping around the curves, like shooting stars. With each dizzying bend, the memories crashed on me like the tide coming in. How you smelled like breakfast and Adidas cologne when you got on the bus in the morning. Playing poker for starbursts on the bus. Watching you sleep on the long, lazy rides home.

I drove home for your funeral, but I didn’t want to. I resisted out of selfishness, dear one, but not in the way you think. As I sat in that stuffy gymnasium, reeking of people, grief, and the memories of middle school, I couldn’t take my eyes off of your coffin. Being a pastor’s daughter, I’ve heard a lot of sermons. Being a pastor’s daughter, I tried to pay attention, but all the speaker’s consoling words hit my ears like they were full of just so much cotton. I’ve never been so angry in my entire life. Past the red-hot, screaming sort of anger, I slipped into the icy, frostbitten kind of anger that slowly gnaws at your soul.

I wasn’t even sure why I was angry, why the cold sheen of your chrome coffin should infuriate me so. All I knew was that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

I should’ve had my arm around my friend, you know. She was sitting there in a black halter dress, dropping her tissues under the bleachers, and crying like it was going out of style. I was sitting there praying that it would. It was like being in a movie. So many young girls with shiny hair and waterproof mascara, adjusting their tight black tops and sobbing to the sounds of Jimmy Eat World.

That’s when I knew for sure that I am a jerk. No one sits at a funeral and criticizes the mourners. No one except me, apparently.

I was sleeping. I was sleeping when it happened. When the cold gray light of dawn was just beginning to lighten the starry darkness of a February night and the little red needle of your speedometer shimmied its way to the zenith and onward, far too far onward. I was sleeping when she called me, and as soon as I answered the phone, before she said a word, I knew. I heard it in the shaky exhale of her breath in the phone, as if it had been yours. I just knew.

When I came home that warm, sunny February Saturday, I drove too fast, anxious to get home, as if being closer would help. I gulped tea and played the Beatles and drove to her apartment in the town I know so well, down a street I’d never driven. I walked into her kitchen like I’d lived there my entire life and watched her do dishes in her sweatpants. The living room looked like a Scot from the sixties had exploded, from the plaid sofa to the shaggy carpet, all in a palette of rust red, beige, and black. We sat on the sofa, alternating between silence, remembering, and the clicking of her fingernails against the buttons of her cell phone as she texted. Her cat quietly attacked my bare feet. When her fiancé came home, she went into the bedroom with him and I sat awkwardly on their sofa and listened to her giggling.

There’s all different kinds of therapy.

It was right about the time I noticed my pale pink fingernail polish was chipped- I’d been noticing details all day- that I realized I wasn’t thinking of you. I was, to my horror, thinking about how I’d write this down later, the details I would cite for the sake of authenticity and poetry.

Even then I was frozen over. I had let myself become like this because the one thing I hate more than someone suppressing their emotions is someone who lets their emotions be determined by the expectations of others. What I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to react, had been laid out for me by countless teen movies, and that made me incapable of doing it.

Mary, Mary quite contrary…how does your cynicism show?

So it was that mindset that brought me there, with old carpet under my black sling backs and skepticism in my heart. As I sat there, thinking that the lights were too bright, the speaker too loud, and the sobbing almost obscenely harsh in the stillness, I knew I was no saint. I also knew the answer to my question.

The “saint-overnight” effect I had condemned so vehemently earlier was, indeed, based on compassion, and not on lack of conviction.

With these heavy thoughts dropping down like raindrops from the ceiling, hitting me squarely on the head, I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the rotting wooden bleachers. It took me a long time to stand up after that.

The next morning, in time to see the sunrise, I drove back to school, back to my classes and my dorm room. Back to my petty problems. I threw myself on them like a drowning man on a life raft.

There’s all different kinds of therapy.