Blue in Green
I keep finding myself in green lately.
Green is his favourite colour. Green was his favourite colour.
It’s been six and a half years, and somehow, I still find myself fighting the urge to refer to him in the present tense. Sometimes, I don’t even bother correcting myself.
Maybe I’m still somewhat in denial. I’ve gone from a daily sighting of him, to a yearly sighting. Perhaps, it’s easier for me to convince myself, to believe that he’d rather not be with me than not be here at all.
Just because he’s gone, doesn’t mean green stopped being his favourite colour. And every time I wear green, I think of him.
My father’s funeral has always been a hazy memory in my mind. There’s a lot of it I’d rather not relive. Seeing his body there, but not seeing him. A body without a soul, nothing left of his essence, the thing that made him, him.
I had no say over what I wore, nor did I have the will to fight for something that would have made me feel a bit better on the worst day of my life.
The sea of hundreds of people, all dressed in black, staring at me. I felt like a zoo animal, exposed and broken. But the one person that stuck out in the sea of black was one man wearing a green polo.
I had no idea who he was, nor was I in the state to want to find out. To be honest, I didn’t really care who he was. I don’t even know if he knew that green is my father’s favourite colour. He walked up to me and shook my hand. In my head, I told him thank you. Thank you for wearing green.
Green is his favourite colour. Green was his favourite colour.
There’s something now, about wearing green when I’m feeling blue.
Blue in green. Green in blue. Green is you.
We operate from this misguided belief that grief and time are two linear concepts. But that’s precisely the problem, we’ve been convinced that time is something that is in constant forward motion. Yet, every day, our thoughts and our memories force us to travel backwards and forwards in time.
Feelings of melancholy and nostalgia brought up by reliving the past, through the absence we feel in the present or the projections of the future.
Grief and time are similar in that they are always in motion. Time does not ever stop, and nor does grief, so it seems. Do you ever stop grieving over losing someone you love? Not really.
Grief simply transforms, changes, molds, inevitably weaving itself into the fabric of your soul.
I spent many years after he passed, digging the deepest trenches in my mind in attempts to bury my grief. But it seems, all I did was plant a seed. A seed of grief that crept up on me. Clawing its way out of the hole, in search of air.
As time passes, everyone around you forgets, they expect you to feel better and in some ways you do. Because it’s easier to think of grief as a temporary state. In the same way that rocks are eroded by water over time, there is a similar expectation for grief. But as rocks weather, they transform into something else entirely.
A rock of grief, worn away into sands of time. A seed of grief, that overtime grew into the new me.
Before he passed, I used to wear black from head to toe. But in the days, weeks, months, and years following, I found myself having a visceral reaction to the colour black. Wearing black from head to toe felt suffocating. It somehow made me feel worse than I already did. For the first time in my adult life, I found myself embracing colour.
The colour green.
It’s not been a conscious thing, but some days I find myself leaving the house draped in green, from head to toe. When visiting a place that he loved, my best friend made a passing remark that green is the colour of the heart chakra.
Green is his favourite colour. Green was his favourite colour.
The heart chakra is our centre for love. Love for ourselves and for others. It is also associated with grief. As I look at the collection of green items I’ve amassed since he’s been gone, it seems less and less likely that my affinity to the colour green is merely a coincidence.
