(By D. Smith Kaich Jones)

the ever-wonderful michael was telling me about this thing that happened, and that’s because, well, remember? he said, that she is married to that guy? and this happened?, and then a while back when that was going on, there was this kid who . . . and his grandfather bought him this toy airplane, and he was friends with another kid, and did i ever mention that they moved across the street from these people who . . . ? and all those stories were separate from one another, but not really, they just looked that way on the surface, they were really all tied together, because that’s how stories work, at least stories in conversations, stories told by real people.

that’s what i think i do.  at least that’s what i try to do.  i start out telling you the story of painting the front room at work, and that reminds me of what i felt when i was buying the paint, the paint was yellow, honey colored, and that reminded me of autumn, and i remembered what i felt when i was standing in the paint store, waiting while the paint was mixed, lots of time for thinking and looking out the windows at the leaves falling away from trees, at the different blue of the sky, lots of time for remembering last autumn and where i would have been on a saturday morning, lots of time for wondering if my need to paint a few walls was a working out the grief i still feel for maggie-the-cat, remembering that’s what i did when my father died, not comparing the two deaths, just thinking about how people deal with grief and moving on, which is not the same thing as “getting over it”, it’s just moving to a different place in the grief.  and i move from that thought back to autumn, which always gives me the blues, just not outside the window, and really it is late autumn that makes me feel this way; early autumn is just a phrase here in east texas, just a mellowing of summer, and i think about the leaves leaving, the turning away from the world that we all do; we go inside, even here where it doesn’t get all that cold ~ it gets cold enough ~ and i remember that that night is turn-back-the-clocks-night, an earlier darkness now, and i move from that thought back to maggie, back to my father, and i am filled with missing.  when i get in the jeep, i cry, still thinking about it all, all those separate stories, but ~ and here’s the thing ~ i stop crying.  i move on.  i get going.  i stop by my mother’s house and she feeds me homemade soup and i tell her my thoughts, and she tells me her dream, which is another piece to the same story, another feeling of missing, of melancholy, and when i get in the jeep to leave, i cry again.  but ~ and here’s the thing ~ i stop crying.  i move on.  i get going.  there is a newly painted room outside this door to prove it.

but i feel the need to tell you the story – tell it to you like we were sitting in my mother’s house, a bowl of soup in front of us, a conversation between us.  there are people who will tell you they painted a room, and maybe they’ll tell you the color, and that will be it, that will be their story.  it is not my story.

remember when? i will say,
and then this happened,
and that thing we were talking of?
. . . yes, yes, that too . . .

Read D. Smith Kaich Jones at Emma Tree
Check out her original post and her other insightful works of a literary persuasion.
Subscribe to her directly.

::

Featured by Story Editor, Sara Sophia