Who Names The Colors

Mother, 2015

It was suffocating in the room, the air hot from Jo leaving the windows open. The humidity had reached record levels that week, but Jo couldn't convince herself to get out of bed. Zoe wasn't up, so she saw no reason that she should be. Just being in bed might have been bearable, but Jo had the blanket and pillows in the nest she had been spending her nights and late mornings.

The blanket still smelled a little bit like him, as did the t-shirt she slept in.

Most days she tried to sleep long past dawn, though that was her most productive time of day, unless she was painting. She wished she could blame her inability to get out of bed on staying up late with paint and wine and exorcised feelings. Coloring the tumult of her belly into art. That wasn't happening. Her canvasses were fallow. When she was able to get a palette going, she was once again contemplating shades of green, and now her lady was hiding from her too.

She was hiding from herself.

Mostly, Jo avoided sunrise, would miss daylight totally not for her toddler. Zoe was her light, they played, and her suggested dance parties - to shake off "mommy's sad face"- were the only time Jo found herself really smiling.

She was also smiling on the phone. Ethan was calling again. A lot. She'd had more FaceTime calls from him and Sean while they prepped for their soon to be trip than she could count. It was like neither of them had left the country before.

Jo supposed that was true. They had both been abroad, but not without their mums to plan and prep and pack. The calls were substituting. They were also keeping Jo on track.

Those calls were her daily meeting. Ethan her unwitting sponsor.

Ethan's face, the opposite of how it had looked the last time he was home, kept her on her phone, away from her message app, and away from Harry's doorstep.

She hadn't even been over to drop off his things. That was at least why she still had t-shirts with his smell on him. She would just switch them every couple days.

The last time they were apart, she wanted it to be forever for good reasons, for his future and him being able to get everything he wanted. Now they were apart, well because they should have never been together.

The part that broke her inside was that they had been. To have that once in a lifetime feeling for someone so perfectly wrong for her, it was a cruel twist of fate. She was knotted up over it. Bent in two and around like a spoon near a fire. Jo knew he had kept things from her, and she'd forgiven him for it. His reasoning made sense, she gave him that. However, things didn't stay dead in the boneyard they were built on, her feelings, for one, just kept coming up, decayed with the passage of the last two weeks. They were animated though, and the had joined the ghosts in her house. Echoes of Harry that she cultivated then loathed and avoided, but could not shoot down.

It should have given her something to paint about, but it mostly gave her heartache and mixed feelings. Empty canvases, fallow heart. Baby giggles were good cures for sadness. Zoe as distraction was wonderful, however, she slept more than Jo, always, but especially now. And rather than avoiding the things that made her restless, she was wallowing in them.

Zoe also wasn't that great to talk to. Precocious as she was, it would have been nice to talk to an adult. Like when Zoe asked for Harry, or brought over their couples unicorns and told her she "did it wrong, Harry does it like this." So Jo found herself wiping tears in the bathroom, or the pantry. Hiding now, not eating, she wasn't eating.

Her guilt was her daily diet. It kept her away from Harry. When she wanted to talk to him, she called Ethan and listened to him happily chatter about Sean. It was another distraction, but she once again wasn't talking to an adult about her feelings. And Ethan avoided the subject like an alcoholic avoided bars. They were both recovering addicts it seemed.