Skip to main content

Color Me Calm

There was once a girl who traveled across the continent to go to college. At 18 years old, she thought herself a trailblazer, a nomad with lofty goals. She left behind a life many would envy- loyal friends, a nuclear family (fractured but not broken), and a town still small enough to invite small town jokes by its residents, many who would live there for a lifetime.  As many eighteen year olds do, she thought herself the nucleus of her world. In her bags, she had love letters from boys she left behind, and gifts from her childhood friends. She had a copy of The Places You'll Go, a course catalog she had highlighted in the early summer days, her dreams of being a doctor between every line she marked.
She had the heartbreak on her sleeve so many girls her age wore, a puppy love that ran its course, the tragic deaths of adoring grandparents, the divorce that had fractured (but not broken) the family. But she considered herself an optimist, a true glass is half full kind of gal, with enough confidence to not look back as the car began its 3,000 mile journey across plains and deserts to Phoenix.
A month later, she no longer found herself the nucleus, but an errant electron, circling a life so unfamiliar and lonely, that the girl often found herself gazing at the sky, fantasizing that there was an otherworldly girl like herself, light years away, feeling the same isolation. An alien soul mate to keep her from feeling so overwhelmingly lonely. In the evenings, she would often sit in the hallway of her dorms, coloring in the stack of coloring books she had brought from home. She would hear the bustle of the other students as they came and went, to sorority parties, to evening labs, to the commons to eat dinner, and she would color away. She would outline first, dark and intense, and then begin to fill inside, the steady and reliable crayon (Crayola Magic Scents) a soothing balm, the methodicalness predictable and comforting. She did this for weeks, coloring across the Disney spectrum. Tulip for Ariel's lips, leather jacket for Price Charming's glossy hair, Lilac for Aurora's dress. Until one day, when she met a fellow East Coaster, one who would join her in dancing across campus in a torrential monsoon, and help her to find a home away from home.

This year there are 3.7 million American high school senior awaiting graduation. Awaiting a future some have planned to the smallest detail since early childhood. A future path on which some are terrified to embark. And in what may be the hardest era for a high school senior to endure since the Vietnam drafts, their atoms are no longer under their control. So many of the rites of passage they were promised are now tentatively buried under a loose pack of soil- prom, graduation, elementary school walk throughs, time capsules opened. The last months of high school, usually filled with parties and furtive kisses with suitors who will someday be forgotten memories, found in a yearbook decades later are instead being spent in isolation, with siblings who are somehow both beloved and reviled, with parents who are suddenly at a loss. The kids but not kids are confused and nervous, though many won't tell their parents this until it has all passed. They may act up, they may stay up in their rooms for an interminably long time. Or they may color. They may find a coloring book tucked into an Easter basket or in an old box of school supplies from grade school, and they may sit down in their favorite chair, the one that gets the lion's share of afternoon sun, and color. And if they do, let them do it without reproach. They will color until the page is full, or until they are ready to close the book and run through the storm.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Musings of a former chubby girl trying to make right

 I’m going to be honest. I take a weight loss drug. These days, we are hearing constantly about Ozempic, as if it’s some cure all catchall miracle- and don’t get me wrong, these drugs can do miraculous things but there are a lot of misconceptions, as there are with so many other miracles. In 2016, I wrote several blog posts about my attempts at exercising and losing weight, so I figured I would do a follow up now that I’ve lost 103 pounds. I would also like to point out that I will be the first person to tell you to love yourself as you are, and that we are all beautiful. This is a personal journey for me, and not in any way indicative of how I feel anyone else should approach their health or their weight.  Fat people and poor people tend to get a lot of blame hurled at them, with people who have never been fat or poor finding a way to diminish the human experiences of others by placing blame. Fat and poor people must be lazy, they’re sponging off the healthcare system, they m...

We are damned if we stay silent, and damned if we speak.

When I was nineteen years old, only a year into adulthood, and only hesitantly an adult, a man sexually assaulted me. We had met in our apartment complex one night, at the community pool. He was good looking, a military man, cocky and confident, and I was going through the end of my first relationship away from my small hometown. I invited him into my home. I kissed him. I let him into my bedroom. That was where my permission ended. When I told him no, he proceeded to try to shove his genitalia up the leg of my shorts, and when I began to cry and told him to stop or I would scream, he told me I was a tease. And I felt guilt. I am going to say that again- I felt GUILT. As a girl, I had been preconditioned to believe that I could feel bad for getting a guy "worked up", and I didn't kick him out. I slept on the floor next to my bed, while he slept in my bed, and I woke to him trying to do the same thing, only to my face. That time, I was done. Typing these words out makes ...

Field of Dreams

A tiny little boy in his Yankee cap, perched on the battered wood in the dugout waves to me, and I realize he is my boy. He has the flushed cheeks of an Irishman, and his hat is a bit askew. He has the nonchalance of a real ball player, and for just a moment, I am left breathless. A boy who only yesterday was struggling with his first steps, is now the beginnings of a tiny man, and I am a surreptitious observer behind a fence. I watch him joke with his friends, his effervescent grin spreading light throughout the dugout, his foot on the bench only slightly too small for the cleat it inhabits. I want to tell him I love him, but it will embarrass him, so I turn my head to damper the urge. There are a thousand boys in the fields tonight. Some reluctantly, there to satisfy their father's need for vicariousness. Aging dads, with rounded paunches creeping over their belts, their caps hiding thinning hair and grey are holding clipboards and calling for the Mikeys, the Lukes, the Nicks to ...