Chapter 2: Green
Journey’s father would never be mentioned as anything more than a foot note in the biography of his life. The day his father left he was wearing an ugly, spinach green sports jacket and a gray fedora hat. He looked back over his shoulder, and perhaps, for a moment, reconsidered his actions as mistaken. And maybe, if time could have been paused in that moment, things would have been different, but they weren’t, and the momentum of his actions carried him out the door. Journeys eyes met his father’s that day as he left, but his face was a shadow, a mask that revealed only his eyes and a shallow divide that even a eight year old could tell was there.
His mother searched for validation in the arms and beds of others. Sometimes Journey couldn’t even remember their names, they changed so often. It was always the same man, for all he could tell, just their faces and their names changed. For a while, Journey tried to keep up with it all, assigned an inexplicable importance to it, but eventually, it changed so fast that it all got lost in his head. Was this Timothy he spoke with or Brad? Is James the one that would bring him candy or was It Cameron? There was Rob. He flashed a smile the color of money anytime he entered a room. Oh, and Phillip seemed to be pretty nice. At least he thought that it was Phillip. Eventually he gave up and they moved like shadows across the emerald walls that lead to his mother’s room, into and out of his life, and into and out of her bed.
She never gave him more than cursory motherly advice. “Drink your milk. If you want to grow up strong, drink all your milk,” and when she embraced him he could tell she wasn’t really there. Something about the way her eyes would stare off into some distant point in a future that didn’t exist. One she longed to be in. She would pull a faded aqua blanket over her shoulder sometimes; it was so cold where she was. When he hugged her, he felt like a puppet whose strings had been pulled as if he were mimicking actions that people who felt real things might take. For years, he wished that he could be free from the weight of his mother’s sadness, selfish as it may have been. If only he could spring time forward, he would. That option barred, he played games and walked with his head turned down the way he was supposed to until he would be able to break free from it all.
On the day his father left, he was wearing an ugly green sports jacket. That much, Journey remembered. If he had ever stopped to think about, he would have realized that that was the day green stopped being his favorite color.
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