Part of today’s plans include starting to repaint the kids’ rooms, which have been painted and repainted at least two times apiece during my marriage. The boy’s will require fixing holes in the wall, too, so it’s second on the list, but it’s not a completely daunting task, at least physically.
The problem is that I don’t want to do it at all. The thought of spending however many hours alone, uninterrupted (you can’t exactly paint in fits and starts), doing something that will undoubtedly bring out some painful memories and and no small amount of feeling sorry for myself just doesn’t appeal to me.
There’s no guarantee of a reward at the end, just the knowledge that this place, that we’d bought to be our home, is now something weighing me down and preventing me from completely moving on with my life. It’s more than I can afford on my present salary, it’s at the limits of what I can maintain alone, and it’s full of the ghosts of a promise that never got fulfilled.
I can’t get rid of the burdens of finance, time, and memory until I get into those rooms and paint—painting involves much more than getting enamel flat Snow Cap* from a bucket onto a wall.
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* Counterpoint to the melancholy self-absorption of the rest of this post: When I got the paint at Lowe’s yesterday, the guy told me that his white paint would be fairly off-white, but they mixed it to be the WHITEST PAINT EVER. I noticed that the label had read, instead of whatever “candlelight” or “eggshell” or “this is the white color they showed you on the card,” ULTRA-WHITE.
“That doesn’t look off-white to me,” I said (this was before reading the custom-printed color label, just looking at the splorch theyd painted as a sample on top of the can).
“It’ll dry darker,” the guy at Lowe’s said.
An hour later, after the usual time at the gym, I checked the cans, noticed that it was still WAY TOO WHITE, read the actual label, and headed back to Lowe’s.
“Um, honest, I was looking more for off-white, not Klan headquarters white. I thought we’d talked about this,” I told the Lowe’s guy.
“Oh, yeah. that’s pretty white. How about we darken it up some?”
“Yeah, that’ll work fine.”
Anyway—now it’s Snow Cap.
1 month ago