It’s 3am and I wake up in the dark, thinking of snow. My lungs feel heavier imagining it packed on the roof. I never knew I was claustrophobic until my first blizzard. Nothing holds me tighter by the throat than the idea of being trapped. The cold licks at the backs of my arms and I am wide awake.
I am not much of a painter but I know you don’t throw a layer of white paint on a canvas and call it snow. You paint around the white: in endlessly morphing shades of blue, shards of gray for shadow; even pinks and lilacs here and there to make it glow. White is what appears only when you step back to see the whole.
A few nights later I will dream of him. My dreams are rarely vivid, more of an impression of color and shape and place. But the feelings are always clear as day. Lately, I feel most alive in my dreams. I am in strange, looming cities. I am in Korea, Rome, a cartoon version of San Francisco. I am everywhere and I am with people that I don’t know but I can feel that they love me and that is all that matters. In this dream nothing else sticks other than the image of him seated, slowly turning his face towards me. And when I see him it’s like I’m feeling for the first time what it will mean to lose him. My dad is dying. My papa. This thing he’s been holding at bay for nearly five years is getting so close now. And I don’t know how I will do it. I don’t know how I will lose him and still be ok. When I wake up the clarity is gone.
The grief darts around my body. I only find it when I’m not looking. For months I jammed the tip of my tongue into the backs of my teeth until a callus formed. I didn’t even know tongues could callous. But it felt right to have a physical manifestation of the pain. And one day I just stopped doing it. The grief moved. I’ll find it again. When it’s ready.
I keep stepping back, expecting to finally see the white. Ohh, there it is. There’s my heartache in all its blinding, painful hues. I keep expecting grief to park itself on my chest and stay. But it never does.
So I keep waiting.