All the Colours of the Rainbow

Sunday just after lunch, in a typical my-daughter-is-sleeping-what-to-do-with-my-two-precious-hours-of-free-time panic, I decide to follow Rory Gilmore’s example and set up a creative circle training station of sorts. I figure, this way, I can maximize my time. I paint the pages of the photo scrapbook I’m making for my daughter and, while I wait for them to dry, I start typing on my laptop. When I hit a roadblock in my writing, I turn to my journal to review the notes I made for another piece a few weeks back, to see whether they wield the kind of inspiration worthy of transcribing wild scribbles into orderly type. They don’t.

I gingerly dab the tip of my finger onto the page painted purple in rough, inconsiderate strokes and reckon they are now ready to be adorned with precious memories. I carefully flip through a stack of photos spanning her first five months, and pick out four that make sense with the chronological order I am trying to follow even though, at this rate, I won’t finish until she’s eighteen. I open the little box in which I keep all the cards we received when she was born, leaf through the remaining ones, and make my vote on which of them will accompany the selection of pictures.

A mess of wrapping paper, giftbags, tags and old magazines I saved for this purpose takes up most of the table, partially covering the other work stations. Staring at the colourful chaos, this incoherence of shapes, textures and possibilities, puzzling it all together into a clear vision of continued flexibility, makes my heart sing. So loudly, I get lost in a medley of sounds – my scissors snipping, zipping through glossy paper, crunching down on cardboard, the lick of the Pritt stick gluing past times on to present pages for future reveries. Its vocal cords lubricated by the warm wishes and wise words on each card, reaching operatic heights.

I map out the next six pages, cut and paste, inhale sharply and move on to the laptop. As I wait for the new installment to dry, I return to the digital page of seeming order and am overwhelmed by the urge to cry. The feeling is not sudden, it doesn’t take me by surprise. It’s the heaviness to such buoyancy, the quiet darkness to such shining light, the inevitable discontinuity to the desired timelessness. I’m not saddened by the arrival of this sadness, nor does it deplete the joy I felt just minutes earlier – it is still stuck to the walls of my ribcage with the same veracity as that of the Pritt eternalizing each photo on to each page. The spotlight simply isn’t on it right now. It is momentarily switched off, urging me to sit in its blinding dark wake.

At night, after sneaking out of bed and onto the couch, I fall asleep reading the same paragraph over and over again. Fittingly, it’s about a Dream Inn – not a motel, an inn, the author is very specific about that, I remember that much. I feel bad about letting my exhaustion win over my will to engage in this beautiful piece of literature, do not want to succumb to sleep as I know I will wake from it feeling as though I have wasted that sacred window between my daughter’s bedtime and my own. That window that begs to be opened, that browsing storm that longs to be welcomed and tamed by the pen in my hand, the paint on my canvass.

I rip myself from my sleep, mumble for Alexa to summon Netflix and click “continue watching”. I do not continue watching. I immediately close my eyes again, burrow myself deeper into my fluffy blanket and continue to let the sounds of Stars Hollow lull me into a comforted, familiar sleep. The Couch Sleep as it is known in my immediate family. A habit I inherited from my dad, the consolation of which I could never quite explain until now: it’s like being cradled to sleep by everyone and everything you know and love, alive and vibrating around you. The husband’s fingers clicking away on his keyboard, my dog softly snoring at my feet; the pitter-patter of rain on the windowsill behind me, the wind pelting against our fragile windows, the la-la-las of a fictional world.

I wake up the next day, my warm, socked feet poking out of a cocoon of blankets. We get ready, strap the daughter into her kraxe and go for a long walk. It is the first time this year we’ve had to dress for the cold. A moment I’ve been awaiting for months: that bite of chill against my jeaned thighs, that shock of pink on my cheeks and the icy tip of my nose. The earth still smells of rain as we trudge along crumbling paths and dart puddles. I almost expect the trees around me to change their shades to autumn hues of warm reds and yellows.

We pass a sad chestnut tree, trapped between a fence and an industrial building, its heavy branches drooping down to the pavement, its nuts still safely packed into its spiky casing, and I feel a kinship. It is only sought out, engaged with and complimented for its shiny, polished surface. There’s no interest in holding its protective shell, its winter melancholy in the palm of the hand – it might just pierce through and disturb one’s own path. And sharing is not necessarily caring. Warmed by the November sun, we strip off a layer of clothes we are wearing and have an impromptu picnic.

I watch them – the dog, sniffing his way through the high grass palms, only his upper body visible, like a crocodile in a swamp; the daughter, her legs outstretched, clicking the heels of her light-up, welly boots together like Dorothy only she doesn’t seem to be longing to go home just yet; the husband, quietly watching her as she laboriously chews on a giant chunk of bread in her mouth, the thoughts in his mind as always a mystery, like the X-files, the perfect mix of profound recognitions and an archive of absurd stories (in the making). My heart is aglow with love and gratitude. But only my lips are smiling.

The summer drought finally ended with the arrival of November’s full moon – hypnotic in its power, almost venomous in its Scorpius intensity. Its sting caught the bull’s eye of my solar plexus, knocking me completely off-kilter with rocketing highs and crashing lows. And as I sit here now, in the whooshing silence of the 5AM clockface, I think of Shannon Hoon watching scorched earth softening under the weight of water, pools of reflection from which to confront his loneliness.

For months I have complained that there’s no rain. Now it’s here and I am happy to move with and, soon, perhaps, through it. As Richard David Precht said once,"sometimes truth reveals itself in beautiful sunny evenings, not in logical sentences." Sometimes it reveals itself amidst the wonderful mayhem of radical artistry on a rainy, moonlit night.

No need for an umbrella to lift the heavy veil that has been cloaking me for weeks – I’d like to keep my cheeks damp today, drenched if need be. Cause there ain’t no sunshine without rain. Sometimes you have to recognize the rainbow for all its colours and stare down those not visible to the eye.