The Apartment I Painted Yellow on Purpose
After the greyest year, I bought the loudest color they had.
The man at the paint counter asked me three times if I was sure. I told him I had never been less sure of anything, and that this was, in fact, the whole point.
The color was called Marigold Shout. It sat on the little sample card between a tasteful buttercream and a sensible ochre, and it looked like a taxi arguing with the sun. The man, whose name tag said DENNIS, held the card at arm's length as if it might go off. "Most people do an accent wall," he said. "One wall. Maybe half a wall."
"All of them," I said. "The hallway too."
Here is what Dennis did not know.
My mother died in January of the year I am telling you about, on a Tuesday, in a hospice room that smelled of lavender air freshener layered over something the lavender could not fix.
And for eleven months afterward I lived inside my apartment like a tenant in my own life. I kept the blinds at half. I ate standing at the counter. Rain sat on the window glass for whole weekends and I watched it the way other people watch television.
The walls were the color the landlord had chosen, a grey the paint industry probably calls Agreeable Something, and I agreed with it completely. Grey walls, grey food, grey little laps around a grey neighborhood.
Grief is not dramatic, mostly.
That was the thing nobody warned me about. It is administrative. It is her name still arriving on envelopes for a year. It is a pharmacy calling to say her prescription is ready, and you standing in the cereal aisle trying to remember how breathing is done.
The yellow started with a lemon.
In December I bought a bag of them for no reason I can defend, and I put one in a white bowl on the table, and for two days... it was the only thing in the apartment that seemed alive.
I would come home from work while the light was dying and there would be this small stubborn sun sitting in a bowl, refusing to match the room. I looked at it the way you look at someone laughing at a funeral. Then I looked at it the way you look at someone laughing at a funeral when part of you wants to laugh too...
My mother's kitchen, in the house I grew up in, was yellow. Not a subtle yellow. A yellow she had mixed herself in 1989 because the store versions were, in her words, "afraid of themselves." Every argument I ever won or lost happened in that kitchen. Homework, shouting, birthday cakes with too much frosting, the phone call about my father, all of it happened in front of those loud yellow walls, and the walls never once flinched.
So in the last week of that grey year, I drove to the hardware store and met Dennis and his doubts, and I came home with two gallons of Marigold Shout, a roller, and a tray I would ruin immediately.
Taping the edges
Nobody tells you that painting a room is mostly not painting. It is moving furniture and finding what fell behind it. Behind the bookshelf I found a hair clip that was not mine and was definitely hers, from the week she stayed with me after her first surgery, when we watched cooking shows and she narrated every mistake the contestants made. I sat on the floor holding a two-dollar hair clip for maybe half an hour. That is a thing that will happen to you. Budget for it.
I rolled the first stripe at nine at night, which is the wrong time to start. The wet color went on like scrambled egg and I panicked. It looked unhinged... It looked like a mistake you cannot take back, and I stood there with the roller dripping and called my brother, who lives forty minutes away and answers on the first ring, because January taught us both to answer on the first ring.
"I painted the wall yellow," I said.
"Like, yellow yellow?"
"Like Mom's kitchen."
There was a silence with a shape to it... Then he said, "I'll bring rollers," and hung up before I could tell him not to come.
We painted until two in the morning. He told me a story I had never heard, about how she painted that kitchen alone in one night while our father worked a double shift, so the decision would already be made before anyone could talk her out of it. "She said if you ask permission for color, you'll be beige your whole life," he said, cutting in along the ceiling, and neither of us spoke for a while after that, because some sentences arrive exactly when they are supposed to.
Grief does not ask you to stay grey. It only asks you to stay. The color was always going to be up to me.
Around midnight we found the pencil marks. Some kid from a previous tenancy had been measured against the doorframe, SAM 4, SAM 5, painted over once already, faint ghosts under the grey. My brother wanted to keep them covered. Instead I traced them with a pencil so they would survive another owner, and I painted right up to the edge and left a small square of grey around them. One deliberate patch of the old year, so I would never be able to lie to myself about where I had been.
What the light did
The next morning I woke up on the couch under a drop cloth, smelling paint and instant coffee, and the sun came through the half-open blinds and hit the wall.
I want to be honest with you: it fixed nothing.
My mother was still dead in a yellow apartment. That is not how any of this works.
But the room was so loud with light that I opened the blinds the whole way for the first time in months, and then, because the walls seemed to insist, I opened the window too. Cold air. Bus brakes. Somebody's radio playing an old song she used to hum badly on purpose. The world, still there, rudely and wonderfully still there.
That week I did something else I had been circling for a year. I sat at the table with the lemon bowl and wrote about the grief directly, instead of writing neat little poems around its edges. It came out ugly and true, which is the best combination I know. On a Friday, with roughly the same feeling I had at the paint counter, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so it would exist somewhere my delete key could not reach it. Later I found a whole shelf of poems by strangers about beginning again, and I read them in my yellow living room and thought... oh. It is a genre. All of us at our paint counters, all our Dennises asking if we are sure.
People ask about the wall when they visit. It photographs terribly. In pictures it looks like a warning sign. You have to stand inside it, at around four in the afternoon, when the light goes long and the whole room turns the color of her kitchen, of an egg yolk, of one stubborn lemon in a white bowl.
Redecorating after loss is a strange phrase. It sounds like throw pillows. What it actually is, I think, is picking one thing the sadness does not get to decide anymore.
Dennis, if you are out there: I was sure.
The grey square is still behind the doorframe, with a stranger's childhood climbing up through it in pencil. Every January, on a Tuesday, I stand there for a minute with my coffee and touch the marks. Then I walk back into all that yellow, on purpose.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.