Melancholy Green

I’m sad every morning because in my dreams you’re still with me.  And when I wake I lose you again.  I want to sleep forever so that you will always be mine.

Her bedroom walls were painted a shade called Melancholy.  It was like sea green and dark teal, but the people who choose names for the swatches of color on a sample strip took their job (to come up with as many different names for paint as there were shades on a color wheel) very seriously.  Melly wondered if the person who christened the third square down on the bluish green strip “Melancholy” would be flattered to know that a woman named her child after it.

I identify with Sinead O’Connor as she stares hauntedly out of that music video, saying she will never be whole again, that nothing compares, nothing compares to you.  You have a strange power over me.  Even when you walk away and say you can’t handle it, it’s there.

“I should paint the walls beige,” she said.  Now that would be an unfortunate name for a baby.  Beige.  Like Paige, only more (or less?) colorful.

Why do I miss you so much?  Why does it kill me that I can’t call because you won’t answer?  Why do I feel like there’s big gaping hole in my life now?  If we were so terrible together, why do I care so much?

“What?” asked Michael, looking up from his laptop.

“Michael” was the most popular name for boys in the year he was born, which meant that more twenty-three-year-old men in the US were named Michael than any other single name.  Melly highly doubted that there was another twenty-five year old woman named Melancholy Green anywhere.  She could be wrong.  She doubted it.

“If I sell the house I should probably paint the walls first.  Something more neutral, so that people can more easily picture making the place their own,” she answered, glancing at him then returning her gaze to the walls.  “I read some tips online.”

“Are you really going to sell this place?”  There it was — that note of wistfulness in his voice.  Why did he like this house so much?

I know that I should be confident and fun.  That’s what the ideal woman should be.  I know I’m not.  That I only have moments. And moments aren’t good enough.  But even messed up people like me need to try.  So I’m trying.  I want to try.

She turned around.  He was sitting on her bed in boxers and a gray t-shirt, frayed around the collar, his laptop balanced on crossed legs that were hairier than when she’d first met him.  Michael was the exact opposite kind of guy that her mother had advised her to find for herself.

The ideal guy, the one that would love you and stick with you forever, was short and homely.  Possibly a little overweight.  Shy, and serious.  Melly remembered her mother telling her this countless times.  And so instead here she had Michael: tall, good looking, average weight, funny and outgoing.  Her mother had always liked Michael, but then, she often said that he reminded her of Melly’s father.

“He’ll break your heart, Sweetness,” Mother had said.  “You want a man that will be grateful to you for even looking his way, not someone who thinks he can get any girl he wants, who thinks he can do better.”

You want to be happy.  So do I.  I need your help right now.  I need to hear you.  To see you.  To not give up.  To talk to you.

But I can’t.  So I write letters.

They broke Melly’s heart, those letters.  Letters her mother had never sent.

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” she said.  “It’s time for a change.”

Michael nodded, but she could tell he wasn’t convinced.  He rented a one bedroom apartment and in comparison this house must look very nice.  It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a yard, and an attached garage.  It wasn’t a fancy house, or a very large one, but it wasn’t rented and it was in a nice neighborhood.

Michael saw a nice little house, and a mortgage that was paid off already.  Melly saw her mother.  She saw the house her mother and father had bought together, two short years before he left her, and she started writing letters.

She saw the fact that she was twenty-five and still living in her childhood home, in the bedroom painted melancholy, because she could not leave her mother alone.

And it had happened anyway.

“I need a change,” Melly repeated.  “To live somewhere because I want to, not because Mom needs me.”

“But that’s just it, you know.”

“What?”

“I just wonder if you want to move because of your mother, not because you don’t like living here.  I mean, this is a great house.”

Melly just looked at him for a long minute, at his disheveled sleep clothes and ruffled bed head, his eyes staring back behind a pair of glasses that he would trade for contacts later.  After breakfast and a shower.

“I want to clean out the whole house, paint all the walls beige, sell or donate almost everything.  And move somewhere new,” she said finally.  “I want it more than I have ever wanted anything, including you.”

Michael knew when to back down.

“Okay.”  He put the laptop down on the bed and unfolded his long legs, springing up and giving her a kiss as he walked past her towards the door.  “I’m making breakfast.”

She sighed, calling, “I’m sorry, Michael,” as he walked away.

“It’s morning, and I’m makin’ waffles!” he called back, in his imitation of Eddie Murphy’s Donkey.

Which meant, of course, I forgive you, you nasty green ogre.

He would understand about the house if he’d lived there for twenty-five years alone with her mother, all twenty-five of them being the “fallout” from three years of her parents as a couple.  One year of dating before buying the house and moving in together, two years of living together, engaged, before her father called the wedding off and left.  It was supposed to be a June wedding; the breakup was in May.  Melancholy Green was born in May of the following year, and it didn’t take a mathematician or a doctor to count back to September.

The letters.  Melly glanced at the shoebox sitting on her dresser.  The box was full of letters dating from over the summer just before her autumnal conception.  They had never been sent — some of them said as much, that the author could not muster the courage to send them and yet could not stop writing them.

They were kind of pathetic.  Poetic, sometimes, incoherent at other times.  Sometimes hopeful, sometimes filled with despair.  Always filled with longing.  There’d never been another man for Mother, not after Father; he was her first and her last and then along came Melly.

She’d first found the box when she was only twelve, and never told her mother that she’d read the letters.  They were embarrassing enough to read, much less talk about.

She knew where her father lived.  He had never been in her life; she had only met him once.  But she knew where to mail the letters.  They were meant for him, after all.

She didn’t know what he would think of them, if there was anything in them that he didn’t already know.  Mother may not have sent the letters, but she’d seen him, talked with him, slept with him, after having written them all.  Melly didn’t know anything more than that, anything more than what her own existence told her.  Maybe the letters would be surprising to him.  Maybe not.

To Melly, they were like suicide letters, twenty-six years before the fact.  And he should read them.  All that was left to do was to wrap the box up, then drive to the post office, stand in line, and smile at the clerk, saying, “I’m fine thanks, how are you?  Yes, first class, please.”

“I don’t blame you.  I know her, after all.  I’ve lived with her a lot longer than three years.”

That’s what she’d said, the one time she met her father.  When he seemed anxious to tell her how he’d tried to tough it out with Mother, but they just weren’t right for each other, and he’d wanted to make her happy, but he couldn’t make her happy.  Melly understood.  Of course she did; her mother was always sad, even when she was happy.  She was the living personification of melancholy, the sad song that never ends, the broken heart that never heals, the raging grief that calms into quiet depression, but never goes away.

Mailing the letters seemed vindictive, seemed a bad idea, if she was to actually mean what she said.  I don’t blame you.  I don’t.  I really, really don’t.  But I do.  Because I stayed with her a lot longer than three years.  A lot longer than you.

Michael had told her that she should do whatever she felt she had to do.  It was vague bit of advice that said he didn’t want to be responsible either way.  She wanted to send the letters.  She had always wanted to, since the day she’d discovered them at age twelve.  They’d languished, sadly, on the shelf for too long.  Just like Mother.

“I spent a lifetime wishing my mother was different, was like the other mothers, who always seemed so cheerful, in comparison,” she’d told Michael.  “Maybe he was right, maybe he couldn’t make her happy; probably no one ever could.  But she was my mother, and she was very fragile, and he broke her . . . even if he didn’t mean to.  So yeah, I blame him.”

“So send them, if that’s what you need to do.”

“I will.”

The smell of waffles, and the thought of Michael, brought her back to the present.  She got up off the bed and went over to the box.

She’d always wanted to be free, free from having to look after Mother, free to go on with her own life.  And now she was.  And yet. . . .  And yet.

She hugged the shoebox to her chest, knowing she would never give it up.  She could paint the walls beige and the sell the house, but the letters?  He would never appreciate them like she did.  How could he?  Neither mother nor daughter meant anything to him.  It was her life, not his, in that box, in those letters.  They were the story of how she came to be, out from the tempest of storming emotion that was her mother.  Melancholy, the quiet after the storm.

She had one letter to add to the box.  She’d been keeping it in her dresser drawer, the one saved for things, not clothes.  She took it out, but didn’t read it, only tucked it in the box with the others.  She didn’t need to read it to remember what it said; she’d read it enough times already.  Instead she followed Michael, and the smell of waffles, out to the kitchen and its walls of Mourning Sun.

My Dear Melly,

Don’t look at this as a tragedy, and don’t blame yourself, whatever you do.  I brought you into this world because I needed someone to love, someone to care for, someone to love me and care for me back.  And that wasn’t a mistake.  I love you more than life itself.  But I know that now I’m holding you back.  You love me, I know, and you may be angry at me for what I’ve done.  But I never meant for you to be chained to me as my caretaker when you should be flying free, being your own person, living your own life.  You say you won’t leave me by myself, you’ll always be there for me, and I know you mean it.  You have made my life worthwhile, and this is my gift to you.  Go now, be happy, be strong.  I’m sorry that I couldn’t.

Love, Mother