Blue

Losing my father was blue.

Azure, crisp, felt like winter at noon.

The kind of blue where you could just sink,

And melt,

Into its warmth.

I scribbled incessantly,

Frantic, frenetic,

Grasping to get at something when death itself means nothing.

And I sank,

Melted,

Into a self-indulgent pool of sadness,

Which welled up around me, seeped through my pores,

And filled me from the inside out.

It soaked me to the chest,

And with drips of grief clinging to me like sweat on the nape of my neck,

I floated at its behest.

•

For months, I floated.

Peering at the world, dry,

Through a viscous aqua lens,

And glimpsed other colours.

Red, firstly,

In the bonfire embers.

Where the hat he (allegedly) gave me lay –

Smouldering –

Like I was,

When his partner,

Twenty years the younger,

Handed me this ugly hat of pink,

And told me he bought it thinking of me,

When he hadn’t seen me in ten years,

Even though he held the key.

•

I saw brown too.

Or rather, how I used to see brown.

Seek it,

In the moles of anamorphic faces blurred in passers-by,

With stubble too long to be that,

Which scratched my cheeks

When he carried me to sleep.

Or on tanned skin and dark eyes,

A bit too young to resemble those,

Which gave birth to mine.

I remember lying awake at night

With my mole burning into my chin,

Searching for its twin

In the man who branded me.

But now, I know,

After seeing his mole sapped of hue –

That a paternal fill,

And this fragile, tenuous connection of brown we had –

Were all making mountains out of molehills.

•

I remember how beautiful the sadness became,

When the numbness mushroomed and buttered me blue.

My body lurching to places,

My eyes staring into others,

My hands gripping another,

As I, my mind, slumbered in a stale syrup of sorrow.

Its caress felt soft, soothing,

With a palpable underswell of strength –

All that my father could have been.

But these habits and hopes –

Of searching for moles,

Of waiting for him to fold,

Of pining for this day of reckoning where he will see how far I came without his hat,

Beg for my forgiveness,

And lament his mistakes –

Have done nothing and

Will do nothing,

But immobilise me in a dull melancholy of washed-out hues,

Douse me in pathetic daydreams,

And leave me dripping without you.

•

Oh, I am a fatherless girl now, and nothing will change that.

But I am a woman who relied on no father before, and nothing has changed that.

•

I was told to visualise yellow.

Amber, balmy, feeling like summer at dawn.

The kind of yellow that your fingertips need to reach for to brush against,

When aqua swirls in puddles around you.

I grasped at those sun rays,

Body pushing against the pool,

Until the yellow,

Emulsified with the red,

Swirled and sloshed the blue like slush

Until one day –

Or months of days later –

I stirred,

Arose.

And as I clambered out with rainbow dripping off me like rain after a summer storm,

I glanced back and discerned

That the pool was a swirling mirage of him,

A delusion of safety that I no longer yearned.