I love those spring-loaded cabinet doors. Is that what they're called? I push them just a little and poong! they spring open into my hand. The force of their opening isn't proportionate to the soft little press of my fingertips, and I guess that's what I like about them. They fall open from gentleness.
I was in the mall yesterday sitting on a bench in the changing room of American Eagle. A stonewashed pair of booty jeans was halfway down my legs, bunched just above the knee and on sale for only $29.95, and I was staring at the wall. My mouth wasn't entirely closed. All I could think was, He proposed. He proposed, he proposed, he proposed. He proposed and I said no. There was a girl on a bench in a mall and I didn't know who she was. There was an echo in the jeans and my skin hung slack.
"Hon, are you okay?" Carol stood beside me, righteous ass spilling pleasantly out the top of some dark-wash slim boot cuts and head cocked slightly to the side. We'd been across half the mall, my $75 of Sephora gift card loose and waiting in my wallet, and I hadn't found a single thing I wanted. Mekong bronze eye shadow, perfect glitter peach something, new colors of lipstick: I had no receptors for them. I had no ganas at all.
I came home and took to my bed. This was okay because, I reasoned, I had run that morning. I had broken through the connective tissue of depression that surrounded my bed, risked death or dementia in the popping of emotional tendons and given myself 8 miles of love. So that evening I let myself just lay there and pretend that things would get better if I laid there longer. I stared at the ceiling and told my friends to distract me on the phone because, oh my god, he proposed, and my sweatshirt collected motes and dead skin cells and the dust mites roamed my face.
Then today my mother called and when I heard her voice, concerned and empathetic, I felt the grief poong through my cells. I rushed off the phone and broke into tears. I felt guilty for not wanting to marry him, guilty that things felt different, guilty that I wasn't choosing a life of financial ease and support with waking the kids at 7 am when I could have had all that, he promised me all that and more. I was aghast at the loss before me and I cried and cried and cried. I stopped to wonder if I was making a gruesome mistake even though I know better.
I flew open and now I feel a little bit better.
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