Ingenue

i. colour me blue

My art teacher can best describe my mood. I'm always a colour to him: something on the electromagnetic scale that he can demonstrate with paint tubes and shiny words.

Right now, I'm blue. I'm blue, like the peeling outside of the opera house downtown, the light that comes off of the screen of a smartphone and the sky, seas and the colour of my eyes.

But my mood isn't beautiful or aesthetic like any of those things. It's a wreck.

I'm a wreck. But wait--before you leave because of the depressive state of my words—I'll tell you I have a reason. It was to this day, only four years back that my mother and I were both admitted into the hospital, for completely reasons, eventually leaving with overpoweringly different results. Our lifelines were manipulated that day, and tugged with almighty hands until we bent into a subtle will that'd lay out the rest of our lives.

I came in after falling head-over-heels in love with the pavement and flipping over the handlebars of my bike to crumple into it and my mum came because the person she had growing inside her: what would've been another sibling for me wasn't growing well anymore.

But my injuries: a broken leg, road rash and an impressive gash up my right side, weren't what really mattered. It was what happened with my brain when I came to as a doctor was taking a plaster mold for my leg.

I woke thrashing that day. I still remember what I'd been dreaming. It had been something that came from the awkward, disjointed brain that was only just discovering its intellectuality.

A dinosaur had been chasing me down that very road on which I'd crashed and it was gaining on me. As I ran, one of my arms started growing dramatically in size and dragging along the concrete. As it grew, I ran slower and slower, trying to hold it up from dragging and falling miserably because running with a giant appendage is quite hard. So I stopped running when the dinosaur was about three meters away from my shadow and started to slap it with the giant arm. The dinosaur struggled to keep running as I bitch-slapped it and I laughed at its struggling. But then my arm started to hurt and I held it over my head. Big mistake. The weight of the thing made me topple over and crash back onto the pavement in the exact same position as before, my arm caught in the storm drain, a random bike tire spinning against the flesh of my stomach and my head on my backpack. And then I woke up.

As I came to, the first thing I noticed wasn't the doctor poking away at my leg, the nurse shoving another needle into my arm or the pain in my brain. It was everything. Somehow, I could then comprehend all this information. So, of course, logically, I started screaming. My mind hurt, hurt, hurt. The doctors took my (I'll admit, somewhat violent) protests to mean that the eight stitches that the side of my skull then possessed were causing me pain.

But that wasn't it. All of a sudden, my mind was bombarded with sensory overload. There were too many senses working at once, and it just didn't make sense. Maybe I "gained" intelligence that day, but I certainly lost one thing that I'd always possessed in large quantities; sense. Sense, in every sense, was just gone from my brain. It was no longer the gridded, easy, dull-edged, organized buzz of activity. Now it was like a room of whiteboards covered—every inch—in writing and words. These words were alive and my brain just seemed to have each of them interact. It made, once again, no sense, but it felt to me like the words almost took on personas of their own. They became beings and fell in love with other beings. They made friends and had sharp-edged sword fights on the edges of cliffs and tides. My brain was a hive of activity and BAM! focus was impossible. I mean, I could focus, I guess, but not easy-going on just one thing like how I used to be able to.

Point is, I was freaked out and so I screamed until I had to come up for air. That day was pretty horrible for me, and so it's one reason why I'm in a bad mood right now.

But what's worse—what's way, way worse—is that that day, my mother lost a baby. She lay in a hotel crying not because of the pain but because of the sadness as my father stroked her back and held her hand, but told herself she had to be strong for me. As I lay screaming because my mind was changed, she was told that her baby girl—her actual, living child—was hurting, so she shrugged on a sweater, wiped away her tears and walked over to my part of the hospital to stroke my back and hold my hand. She was an incredible person that day, but doing that was what broke her into the way she is nowadays.

Maybe, if things had gone differently that day, I'd have stayed the same way and I'd have a baby sister or brother that grew up to be the smart one of the family while I struggled through school and led a fulfilling life at my Lexical reading level. Maybe, if things had gone differently that day, my mother wouldn't chug down a drink anytime she say that there might be the danger of experiencing actual emotion.

And so today, I'm mourning. That's what I told the school secretary on the phone this morning (Hello there, my daughter won't be coming to school today because she's in mourning). Mostly, I'm mourning for concepts. I'm mourning for my ingenuity, my mother's sanity and the little person that shared some of my DNA (I mean, kind of) and that I never got to meet. I tell myself that I'm allowed to be sad for all of things even though only one of them is an actual, feasible thing. I tell myself that I'm allowed to think of all of these things as equal because while I have a morality, my life was so much easier when my mind took time to process things and I equate that to not having a second sibling, and that to the fact that my mother can't process things anymore—opposite of me—without alcohol to soften the blow and take away the edge and smooth over the rough parts.

Maybe it's stupid, but this morning, I woke up (at 8:45 so that I could phone the secretary masquerading as my mother in time), and then lit three candles in honour of these three things that I kinda wish still existed.