She’d upturned it all. Every drawer, every cabinet, every box, every painted canvas—even the utensils flung across the floor. It was like a tornado had swept the apartment. I stepped through the apartment door and immediately lifted my foot again.
A spoon. A spoon somehow lay prone at the entrance of what had been a home. It was still a home, but the disarray made me panicky. I itched to set things to rights. I shoved my hands in my pockets.
“Talia?” I called.
“Shh!”
The shushing came from the back of the apartment, and I pointed my feet in that direction, sidestepping a pile of clothing and playing a strange game of hopscotch over books, pens, and scraps of paper.
I heard her whisper coming from the bathroom. “But what do I want?”
“There you are.” I rounded the doorway, and there she sat. Talia perched on top of the dryer with her legs crossed. Her dark hair was piled high on her head, and she held a purple washcloth in one fist and a hairdryer in the other hand. If I hadn’t been as worried as I was, I would have laughed. She looked crazy.
“Do I like this?” She pushed the fisted purple washcloth at me. “And what about this? What do I like because I like it? And do I only like these things because someone told me to?”
“What are you doing?”
“I chose purple because my grandma told me the best kind of people love purple.” Talia threw the washcloth but it flopped at the foot at the dryer. “I don’t even like wash cloths! What are their purpose?!”
“Is this about –”
“STOP.” Talia’s green eyes pinned me to where I stood. “Don’t you DARE assume anything upon my experience. I’m doing important work, and if you’re going to try to jump in and organize, you can leave now.”
My eyes widened.
She caught my expression, and she heaved a deep sigh. Her head drooped, and she set the hairdryer down then jumped off the dryer. “Ugh, I’m so sorry. That came out wrong, but I do mean what I said.”
I held up my hands. “Hey, I got to be honest. I want nothing more than to organize your apartment, but I won’t.”
She crossed to me, wrapping her arms around me. “You’d better not, but it’s good to see you—let’s get a cup of tea.”
I followed her into the kitchen, where boxes of pasta had been stacked haphazardly across a counter while bowls paraded across the refrigerator. “It looks like the Tasmanian Devil spun through here.”
I studied my friend. Though she had bags under her eyes, her step seemed lighter somehow. I had a pretty good guess about why she was going through her stuff—any big life change could cause someone to do this, whether it was a heartbreak or a success.
“What’s your favorite color?” Her question drew me back to the present. Talia had a regular soup pot of water on the stovetop. And she’d managed to find two mugs.
“You know that. It’s always been blue. Where’s your teapot?”
“Oh, I don’t like it.”
“But you love tea.”
“Yes, but I hated that teapot.”
I squinted at her. I’d known her for almost the same amount of time as I’d known myself. But this Talia was different, and I couldn’t quite place it.
“I see you looking at me.” She handed me her box of tea.
“Something is different about you.” I chose a honey chamomile tea bag.
Her laugh was soft. “Grief does that to a person.”
“No one died.” I should have stopped the words before they left my mouth, but I didn’t. They were out before I could stop them.
Talia pulled herself up onto the kitchen counter, drawing her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees and just looked at me. Her gaze was steady. No anger but a twinge of sadness with heavy questions.
I breathed deep, part of me wanting to hide from that gaze but another part of me wanted this conversation—yearned for it.
“You’re right. No one did die.”
“Then, why are you acting like this?”
“What do you mean by ‘this’? Do you mean my apartment and my stuff and my questions?”
“Yes, but why be so dramatic like this?”
Talia swept her apartment with a quick look before her green eyes came back to me. “You think I’m being dramatic?”
“Yes, a little. Lots of people deal with similar situations as you have, and they don’t walk out on their job, friends, life like you have.”
She caught her lip between her teeth. “Good.”
“Good?” Was it just me or was she making this more difficult than it needed to be? Was she trying to push buttons? This was the other problem of knowing someone so well.
“Yes, good.” Her green eyes brightened. “I would hope that I would deal with this in a different way than others.”
It was clear. She’d gone crazy. I frowned at her.
She reached out toward me with her palm out. “You, more than anyone, ought to know that this is a good thing for me. We grew up similarly, and you know I’ve always done everything the way we’ve been told. You wore jeans so I did too. My grandma told me to like purple so I did. I worked a job that my dad told me would be the one for me, and I live in the apartment that my brother rented first. What part of this life is actually mine? Have you ever wondered? Jael, I don’t even know my favorite color.”
“It’s purple.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“But it’s always been purple.”
“I thought so too.” Tears welled up in Talia’s eyes, making her green eyes sparkle like a forest in a rainfall. “But I realized that purple is my favorite because someone told me it should be. And I loved my life because people have told me that I should love it.”
She flipped the burner off for the pot of water that was now boiling. “Do you know what it’s like to realize that you live your life on everyone else’s terms but your own?”
“But, you’re Talia.”
Tears glistened on her cheeks. She didn’t even try to wipe them on her shoulder as she balanced the pot of water and slowly poured our cups of tea. She didn’t answer me.
“What’s simpler than just being you?” I took my cup of tea off the counter.
“Because being me has always been about fitting other people’s definitions of me. When did it stop being okay for me to just be me? Where did I internalize the message that I was only likeable if I conformed to other people’s ideas?”
“What’s something you know about you?” Watching Talia like this made me desperately want to set her life back to rights, place everything back on the shelves for her, and just make it better.
“That I’m the one who died.”
“What?”
“Me. I died. The person who I thought I was can no longer exist here because I’m no longer her.”
My breathing came shallow. Now I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m finally asking myself what I want, what I like, and how I want to live. This is my one beautiful life, and I want to live it well. So I’m sorting.”
I blew across the steam coming off of my tea, and my heart hammered in my chest. A question pressed against my lips. “Do I get to stay in your life?”
She’d been staring at her own mug when I’d asked the question, and now, her eyes snapped up to me. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
Thanks for reading!
I wrote this little piece while listening to “Alone Together” by Ghostly Kisses.
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