“Greer,” I say. “Do you still love Kit?”
I don’t know where that comes from. Greer has never even hinted at still having feelings for Kit. But how many times has she told me that art begins to flow from a source of hurt?
“Art is the blood that comes from a wound. You can’t let it scab; let it keep bleeding. Let it bleed until you have enough blood to paint with.”
Her face changes with my question. There is a shift in her eyebrows, a dulling of her eyes.
“The truth, Greer,” I say. I’m holding my breath. The answer to that question is so fragile I’m afraid the air from my lungs will break it. She turns to face me, holding the hair back from her face with both hands. The tattoos on the underside of her arms are visible against her white skin. BE THOU on one side, YOUR ART, on the other.
“Yes,” she says. “I am.”
I look away from Greer and back out at the water. Kit, the pied piper of love. How many others were there? Girls at work? Girls in his graduate program? I laugh at my own stupidity, but the wind catches the sound and carries it away.
“Oh shit,” I say, dropping my head into my hands. This was really messed up.
When we climb back into her car, we’ve yet to say anything else to each other. A line I have never seen before appeared between Greer’s eyes after her confession, and has yet to smooth away. I sit slouched in the passenger seat, my mouth dry, and a heaviness weighing across my chest. Her car smells like leather and lemons. I breathe it in as we follow the line of cars off the ferry. I remember the pictures I took and scroll through them to distract myself. There is a picture of her surrounded by the pastel sunset. It’s so vibrant. The light catches the top of her exposed shoulder, where there is the hint of a tattoo. It’s beautiful. I post it to Instagram—because it’s probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken—hoping Kit sees it. Look what I have of yours. It’s purple!
I caption it with Greer’s words. Who wants to hide from the truth? Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges. #TRUTH
The ride from the Kingston ferry to Port Townsend is about an hour, depending on how fast you’re driving. During that hour, the photo of Greer gets three thousand likes, and my Instagram gets a thousand new follows. I track the likes to two blogs who reposted the picture, crediting me, each blog having over thirty thousand followers. I read through the comments on the photo, blushing at the things they say both about Greer, and the mysterious photographer. Kit is not one of those likes. He liked someone else’s picture a few minutes after I posted the picture of Greer, so I know he saw it.
“Whoa,” Greer says, when she opens her Instagram. “That’s a great picture.”
“A fluke,” I say. “I’ve never taken anything as good as that before.”
She puts the car in park outside of the cannery. “So, maybe today is the start of great pictures. Make sure your next one is better.”
I purse my lips. “Okay.”
I make to open my door, but Greer grabs my hand and squeezes it.
“I’ve moved on, Helena,” she says. “You can love someone your whole life and not know why. You can even live with it. This doesn’t change our friendship.”
I smile tightly. “Of course it doesn’t. Because he’s not mine. If he were, you wouldn’t be okay with me.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “I want him to be happy.”
“That’s easy to say until the person you love is happy with someone else. Girls always choose men, and men always choose the wrong girls. It’s an endless cycle.” I wonder if she was helping herself or helping me when she forced me to go to the wedding with her.
This time, she doesn’t try to stop me when I get out of the car. The beige bitch can say things that make sense too.
There’s a lot of rebuilding to do after your heart breaks. For instance, you have to rearrange your perspective. What is important now that I have no desire to eat, drink, work, play, love, sleep, talk, or think? Healing. You have to focus on the minuscule, stupid things that make you happy every day. Like taking out your box of socks and touching each one. Posting beautifully depressing pictures of Port Townsend to Instagram, which generate thousands of likes. I get paid by third party advertisers to wear this and post that. I’m just a beige bitch with something to say. Wine makes me happy. Every night I drink an entire bottle and stare at my favorite wall. I even like the way it feels when I wake up to a headache, my stomach rolling from a hangover. It gives me something to focus on other than the melancholy of my heart. My mood changes by the hour, which makes me feel like a crazy person. Like yesterday, when I stood looking at the water and didn’t think about drowning myself, I felt proud. But two hours later I held a bag of rat poison in my hands and wondered if it was delicious. Greer tells me I have to take back my power.
“What power?” I ask her.
She screws her face up in deep thought before she finally says, “Do you know how in Pirates of the Caribbean when Calypso…”
I’ve never met anyone who delivers Disney analogies with such a punch. I get it. I think. It makes me laugh in any case.
I’m different. Kit showed me things, so I focus on that—the things I’ve learned rather than the things I’m not getting to experience. I’ve noticed that people don’t really look you in the eye, because their eyes are somewhere else. Pointed inward. I make it a point to look everyone in the eye so they know I’m seeing them. That’s how Kit made me feel—seen. I want to see people. I’ve also noticed that the more you see people the more they want to trust you with their secrets. Phyllis tells me that she gave a baby boy up for adoption when she was fifteen. A customer tells me that she collects rocks the color of her ex-boyfriend’s eyes, and that her husband thinks her rock gardens are just a love of minerals. A stranger tells me that she was raped two weeks ago. It goes on and on. When you care, people can feel it. And then, in my new position as town secret carrier, I realize that Kit made me a better person.
Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
I don’t know where that comes from. Greer has never even hinted at still having feelings for Kit. But how many times has she told me that art begins to flow from a source of hurt?
“Art is the blood that comes from a wound. You can’t let it scab; let it keep bleeding. Let it bleed until you have enough blood to paint with.”
Her face changes with my question. There is a shift in her eyebrows, a dulling of her eyes.
“The truth, Greer,” I say. I’m holding my breath. The answer to that question is so fragile I’m afraid the air from my lungs will break it. She turns to face me, holding the hair back from her face with both hands. The tattoos on the underside of her arms are visible against her white skin. BE THOU on one side, YOUR ART, on the other.
“Yes,” she says. “I am.”
I look away from Greer and back out at the water. Kit, the pied piper of love. How many others were there? Girls at work? Girls in his graduate program? I laugh at my own stupidity, but the wind catches the sound and carries it away.
“Oh shit,” I say, dropping my head into my hands. This was really messed up.
When we climb back into her car, we’ve yet to say anything else to each other. A line I have never seen before appeared between Greer’s eyes after her confession, and has yet to smooth away. I sit slouched in the passenger seat, my mouth dry, and a heaviness weighing across my chest. Her car smells like leather and lemons. I breathe it in as we follow the line of cars off the ferry. I remember the pictures I took and scroll through them to distract myself. There is a picture of her surrounded by the pastel sunset. It’s so vibrant. The light catches the top of her exposed shoulder, where there is the hint of a tattoo. It’s beautiful. I post it to Instagram—because it’s probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken—hoping Kit sees it. Look what I have of yours. It’s purple!
I caption it with Greer’s words. Who wants to hide from the truth? Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges. #TRUTH
The ride from the Kingston ferry to Port Townsend is about an hour, depending on how fast you’re driving. During that hour, the photo of Greer gets three thousand likes, and my Instagram gets a thousand new follows. I track the likes to two blogs who reposted the picture, crediting me, each blog having over thirty thousand followers. I read through the comments on the photo, blushing at the things they say both about Greer, and the mysterious photographer. Kit is not one of those likes. He liked someone else’s picture a few minutes after I posted the picture of Greer, so I know he saw it.
“Whoa,” Greer says, when she opens her Instagram. “That’s a great picture.”
“A fluke,” I say. “I’ve never taken anything as good as that before.”
She puts the car in park outside of the cannery. “So, maybe today is the start of great pictures. Make sure your next one is better.”
I purse my lips. “Okay.”
I make to open my door, but Greer grabs my hand and squeezes it.
“I’ve moved on, Helena,” she says. “You can love someone your whole life and not know why. You can even live with it. This doesn’t change our friendship.”
I smile tightly. “Of course it doesn’t. Because he’s not mine. If he were, you wouldn’t be okay with me.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “I want him to be happy.”
“That’s easy to say until the person you love is happy with someone else. Girls always choose men, and men always choose the wrong girls. It’s an endless cycle.” I wonder if she was helping herself or helping me when she forced me to go to the wedding with her.
This time, she doesn’t try to stop me when I get out of the car. The beige bitch can say things that make sense too.
There’s a lot of rebuilding to do after your heart breaks. For instance, you have to rearrange your perspective. What is important now that I have no desire to eat, drink, work, play, love, sleep, talk, or think? Healing. You have to focus on the minuscule, stupid things that make you happy every day. Like taking out your box of socks and touching each one. Posting beautifully depressing pictures of Port Townsend to Instagram, which generate thousands of likes. I get paid by third party advertisers to wear this and post that. I’m just a beige bitch with something to say. Wine makes me happy. Every night I drink an entire bottle and stare at my favorite wall. I even like the way it feels when I wake up to a headache, my stomach rolling from a hangover. It gives me something to focus on other than the melancholy of my heart. My mood changes by the hour, which makes me feel like a crazy person. Like yesterday, when I stood looking at the water and didn’t think about drowning myself, I felt proud. But two hours later I held a bag of rat poison in my hands and wondered if it was delicious. Greer tells me I have to take back my power.
“What power?” I ask her.
She screws her face up in deep thought before she finally says, “Do you know how in Pirates of the Caribbean when Calypso…”
I’ve never met anyone who delivers Disney analogies with such a punch. I get it. I think. It makes me laugh in any case.
I’m different. Kit showed me things, so I focus on that—the things I’ve learned rather than the things I’m not getting to experience. I’ve noticed that people don’t really look you in the eye, because their eyes are somewhere else. Pointed inward. I make it a point to look everyone in the eye so they know I’m seeing them. That’s how Kit made me feel—seen. I want to see people. I’ve also noticed that the more you see people the more they want to trust you with their secrets. Phyllis tells me that she gave a baby boy up for adoption when she was fifteen. A customer tells me that she collects rocks the color of her ex-boyfriend’s eyes, and that her husband thinks her rock gardens are just a love of minerals. A stranger tells me that she was raped two weeks ago. It goes on and on. When you care, people can feel it. And then, in my new position as town secret carrier, I realize that Kit made me a better person.
Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
