# Colourless *Aug 8 2022* The face drains of colour after news of mother’s death. Not pale, simply retreating into a blank mass, I imagine, cowering from the cold of the open doorway. The informer stands before me under the snowfall. I cannot see her, but can only imagine with how much care she prepared her delivery, how she practiced the right contortion of her face, to show care, empathy, patience, understanding, how she strains not to shiver under the snowfall. I should give her more attention. I try to fix my eyes on this woman as I begin to shiver myself, thanking her with chattering teeth and slowly closing the door. Mother had been missing for weeks after fathers death. Searching for her, I begged for an answer to why she’d done that to herself: we hated father, we had a pact. We lived only when he was away. I am not a liar, I will confess. Father’s death meant freedom, joy to do what we wanted with our lives. To cross the threshold of our door without preparation. Which now, bedridden once more, I realize is a cruel irony. Days pass, I crawl awake simply to drink water, to piss, maybe to eat. I witness my thoughts in passing fragments, small glimpses which I do not attempt to grab. I realize they are memories. Soon, as if threatened by growing tolerance, they grow in pungency and make me vomit. Crawling across the floor, chittering, the chunks find a safe haven in the corners of the room. I should be standing, cleaning, fixing, moving. The sound of a bell resets these thoughts and I lie in emptiness. Floating. A tapping on my door echoes across the moonlit vacancy of this small home. A patient tapping. Every day the taps grow in numbers, one tap today, two tap tomorrow, three taps… twenty five taps, and an audible groan escapes me. I want to yell ‘go away’, go away, go away… the door opens, a hand slithers inside, drops a letter, and disappears. In three days, I bring myself to open this letter, addressed to me from mother. Mother begins with simple pleasantries. Written in flowery language uniquely hers, she describes her departure from home simply: she walked out the door and found it a lovely day, the light shining in sparkling glints across the grass. She is pulled forward, unable to stop, feeling the best she has been in weeks, the condemning pain in her joints melting away. The concrete of the sidewalk cracks and opens to grass, and soon she is walking in a soccer field. Young boys compete in the distance. Into a meadow and the shade blots her vision of watercolour, uncovering a canvas of bile, cawing of a raven reminding her of him. She walks faster, away, though her plush feet are punctured by an unforgiving field of thistle. Mother describes the sensation of becoming colourless, words failing her, but the paper of the letter dried and now wrinkled from water droplets. I run my hands against the letter and hear a grating noise behind me. Mother stands in my room, naked, her face twisted and mouth agape, she collapses into dust.