Falling From Grace

POSITIVE

With a resigned sigh, I dragged myself out of my bed. It was the first time in nearly forty-eight hours that I had done so for reasons other than to use the bathroom. The ever looming return to school had kicked my depression into high gear when the last weekend of summer started.

I needed to take a shower and wash the stiffness out of my body, as well as my face. Dried tears could iron a face flat, my mom used to say, and she had been right. Plus, I couldn't face this horrible first day looking my worst, even if my worst was only second place to my best. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and recoiled at what I saw. Ugh, I was ghastly. There were lines imprinted on my face from the creases in my pillowcase, and my eyebrows were all spiky and pointing in odd directions. I definitely needed to shower and shave. And brush my teeth. Ew—I've never been a stickler for personal hygiene on an OCD level, but there was something to be said for having smooth armpits and legs, and clean teeth and hair.
Gross! At the moment, my teeth felt like they'd been soaking in sludge, my hair...it needed prayers. My legs and armpits? Big Foot would be frightened.

I climbed into the shower and sat on the little bench that was molded into the shower wall; I waited for the hot water to hit me. I had to stand up to readjust the angle of the showerhead, but after a few minutes, I was as close to content as I could possibly be with the world outside waiting for me to face it or return to cowering beneath my blanket.

While brushing my teeth in the shower, I did a very—and highly unusual for me—girl-type thing and thought about what it was that I would wear. I hadn't bought anything new this year. Dad didn't have the money for anything other than secondhand when it came to my clothes, and with class and lab fees for school, there really wasn't much to spend on the secondhand stuff anyway. Everything I made working at the Library during the summer had been socked away for college. My old standbys were a pair of jeans and one of my many garage sales t-shirt finds. So after mulling it over in the steam, I decided that if I was going to be the butt of every joke today, I might as well do it as comfortably as possible.

With that oh-so-important decision now out of the way, I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and started to squeeze the pink, sweet smelling goo into my hands. It was at that moment, while staring at the shimmering pink sludge, that I remembered the object that Graham had placed in my hands before ending our friendship and turning my whole whole world into one burning mound of rubble. What was it? Where did I put it? With haphazard care, I rubbed the soap into my hair and quickly rinsed, soaping the rest of me in record time before I jumped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around my body. It went around almost twice and I made a quick mental note that I had to learn to eat better.

I hurried back towards my bedroom, which was directly across from the bathroom, and scanned it quickly, assessing the most likely places it could be. Ugh, it stunk. It smelled like depression, tears, sweat, and...ashes? Had my figurative burning create actual smoke? I shook my head at my own digressive imagination.

My bed wasn't made, as usual—why make it when I'd just sleep in it again? Clothes were strewn on the floor, while the hamper sat in the bathroom half-full. The curtain hanging over the large window facing the doorway was closed, letting in no real light other than a small sliver of blue-gray. I pushed it aside and opened the window, letting some of the stale air out. And there, on the floor beneath the sill where it had fallen, lay what Graham had placed into my numb hands.

I got down on my knees to inspect it, a little whimper of delayed grief catching in my throat when recognition hit; it was a little pink ceramic whale that I had made in the second grade. Or what kind of resembled a whale; seven-year-old whales looked a lot different from seventeen-year-old whales.

A depressed smile crossed my face as a ten-year-old memory slammed into my chest. The whale held a shard of ceramic that had once been the tail of Graham's little green whale, which had exploded in the kiln during firing. He cried so hard that day; I felt so bad that I gave him mine. My seven-year-old mind had rationalized that it was his whale, too, and that he'd appreciate it more than I would. That was the day he told me he loved me for the first time. It was seven-year-old playground love, the kind you have for your favorite stuffed animal, but it signified the true beginning of our friendship, and he needed to get rid of any reminders of that.