Sea Salt Bailey Quinn

Sea Salt

Bailey Quinn

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it—you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”  — Richard Siken

On the first day, your naked back exposed as you slump down, your shirt inching up to introduce your bare skin to the cold wall—that is when you will notice it. You won’t know how you could have possibly missed it.

Perhaps it is because you never had your heart broken while boiling pasta. Or been dumped while chopping vegetables. Or you were never told that they don’t love you anymore and maybe never did while measuring out what you thought to be sugar, but turned out to be salt instead. Perhaps before this moment you have never had your heart broken in your kitchen, but you can’t say that anymore.

And somehow even when the words fall off of their tongue, even as the glass shatters as it slips from your hand; even as you back into the wall as they run from the scene of the crime, you will only notice the paint.

How it is peeling. How the flakes are pooling onto your hardwood flooring. How it overlaps onto the wall, crests and troughs of shaky handy work reminiscent of fresh snow banks in February. And you will remember painting it with them. You will remember collecting color swatches from the paint section of Home Depot and you will remember choosing “Sea Salt’’ instead of “Cream” because you thought “Sea Salt” sounded more grown up and more fitting for a house of new beginnings and crown moulding; although you didn’t know what crown moulding even was, but they did, and you loved them for always knowing what you didn’t. Like where your keys are, or how to change the smoke detector batteries, or how to leave you in the middle of the kitchen you painted together.

On the second day, you will not look past your feet. You will tell yourself this was for the best, you are better off, it was bound to happen, you should make them regret ever leaving you, but you won’t be able to look past your feet. You won’t be able to look in the mirror, because you will see the shirt they left behind, three sizes too big, hanging off of your drooping shoulders, sleeves still damp from wiping the tears. You will see the bags under your eyes like rotting figs, and then you will remember reading the comparison of eye bags to rotting figs in a poem somewhere, and you will think you can smell the death and decay radiating off of your heart.

You will only be able to look at your feet, and yet you will not notice the paint, or at the very least you will allow it. You will ignore the way the layers of paint chips will coat the floor of the kitchen —“Sea Salt” will appear to be coming in, overtaking the “Robin’s Egg” blue walls, a tide of only foam, sucking in the sea and leaving only mist.

After the first week, you will learn how to make coffee again. You will take a shower, and still get back into their shirt, but at the very least you will put on fresh underwear and fuzzy socks. You will learn how to play house. You will do the dishes. You will bake banana bread. You will fill the hole in the bed with new pillows. You will consider getting a cat or a haircut. You will probably get neither and just bake more banana bread.

Your steps will slow and slip as the white paint begins to fill every room up to your ankles. You will fill the dishwater, and you will use an old mug to scoop out the paint as it sloshes onto the dishes and fills the detergent capsule with milky liquid. Even when the frayed threads on the hems of your jeans become glazed, and harden over in “Sea Salt,” you will not acknowledge the tides of white paint lapping at your ankles.

You will be wondering what they are up to. You will be wondering if they have moved on, if they are handling it just fine. You will want them to be happy and you will not know why it hurts so badly. And then you will realize the mug you have been using was their favorite. You got it for them two birthdays ago. You will not believe they left it, just like that. Left you, just like that.

And then it will hit you all over again. And it will feel like you have been shot. Hand to the chest, tears collecting in your

eyelashes, like empty buckets left out in the rain, bubbling over. You will fall to your knees as the dishwasher starts, as the coffee gurgles into the mug, as the baking timer dings, as the paint soaks through your jeans, as the tears pour down your face and dilute the paint until it is translucent and you can see your rippling reflection on the surface.

After the first month, you will be dumping pails of paint out the windows. Even when you use the books on your nightstand to paddle your mattress to your closet, the bedframe sunken somewhere down below; even when you sleep in your rubber rain boots, you will still not acknowledge the flood of white in every room. You will wake up, only to cough up chalky white chunks of congealed paint, and then you will continue on. Some mornings you find it easier to breathe than others. Sometimes it will feel like you are drowning on dry land, except it is not dry, it is only white paint, covering every wall, every surface, and submerging everything and sinking anything that comes near.

It is not until after the first year, you will finally notice the paint. It will not happen when you buy only white clothes so the paint soaked clothing will no longer call for attention. It will not happen when you find out they are with another and you wake up face first in the paint, the moon reflecting off of the surface.

It happens when you try to remember what color your walls used to be, and you cannot recall. The “Robin’s Egg” was your choice. You had thought it was perfect because the light streams through the kitchen window when you make pancakes in the morning and it hits the mirror just right.

So you bought a blue sweater. So you will paint your ceiling blue, because everything else will be leached of color, only “Sea Salt” creeping up every wall, but not what is within reach. Not what is manageable. You buy white curtains with small forget-me-nots embroidered all over, and then once you realize you are tired of swimming through the unrelenting tides of paint, you will open the doors. You will break the windows. You will use their old shirt to shove the rising waves of “Sea Salt” out of the door, out the windows, out, out, out out.

And it will feel easier to breathe. And you will realize how much you missed color. And as you back into the kitchen wall, as blue as ever, you will realize the paint still overlaps just the slightest between the wall and the floor. The smallest crests and troughs still dip down to the hardwood, still rise to the shores of “Robin’s Egg.”

As you slip to the floor, head resting on the rug, surprisingly dry and the stripes still iridescent, you will, perhaps forever, think about how you are laying on the floor thinking about the small gaps of paint of all things, your head on a rug, your body still covered in paint, their old shirt destroyed and laying dejected on the front stoop, and about how the kitchen might look good in a “Sage Green” shade, and perhaps you will go to the Home Depot and pick up a sample and some new brushes and you will not go near the white paint.