Page 2 of In Somnis

Turns out you can be surrounded and still be… optional.

Somehow, I arrived at thirty-five with a Favorites list that fits on one screen and contains nobody I can call.

I go to my voicemails and hover over that message. The one I’ve listened to exactly seventeen times since leaving Boston, just to make sure it still hurts as much as I remember.

Yeah, no. I need a break from that.

I drop my forehead to the steering wheel. There are only three words I need to focus on right now.

“Come to me.”

“I hear you, Tess,” I whisper to the empty car. “I’m trying, but I need a nap first or more coffee.” My stomach growls. “And… maybe something to eat.”

There’s a suitcase on the passenger seat, but it’s all nail kits, lip balms, and pretty skirts and sweaters, comfort for a version of me that still has bandwidth to spare for that. What my soul actually needs is buried in the trunk.

I grab my purse from the back seat, drop my phone into it, and stumble out of the car with shaky legs, smoothing a hand down my favorite white sundress with bright yellow lemons on it. It’s tighter in the belly than it used to be, clingy on the hips, but I don’t have it in me to care right now.

“No black, Lenny. I want your light. Your lemons.”

When I was eight, Mom made me a lemon cake from scratch just because I said yellow felt like happiness. There was no occasion or reason for it. Just flour on her cheek, music too loud, and her voice narrating every step like I was her favorite audience.

“We don’t wait for reasons to make something good, Lenny. We just make it.”

So when my mom asked for sunshine and citrus, she got them, even if she’s not here to see them.

The dress was already snug the morning of her funeral. I kept telling myself it was just stress, just my body doing what it has always done when life gets hard. A few pounds more on top of my already chubby thighs. Temporary, something I could fix once the worst of it passed.

As if grief is something you can out-diet.

After four days of living in this dress, it’s become a lemon-printed sausage casing. The zipper digs into my ribs, the neckline bites my collarbone, and the whole thing presses against my stubbornness, which refuses to let me take it off because Mom wanted lemons and light.

But how many hours does it take to honor a dying wish? When do you stop wearing grief?

Probably as soon as I find a bed and a shower.

I pop the trunk open and dig through my second suitcase until my hands find the oversized cream cardigan. Mom’s. I press my face into it before I can stop myself, breathing in what’s left of her, laundry detergent, and her favorite cream. It’s wrinkled to hell, and it won’t smell like her forever. I’m acutely aware of both of those things as I pull it on, but the fabric is soft in that way that makes your shoulders drop without meaning to, and for one, small, merciful second, I feel held. Not okay or fixed, but wrapped in her, standing in a parking lot in the middle of nowhere, trying to keep the October chill off my shoulders.

I take another sniff, needing the small connection and ignoring the fact it’ll stop smelling like her eventually, gradually, and then all at once, until I’m left holding something that’s just a cardigan again.

Chin up, Lenny.

I grab my purse again and head toward the diner.

The bell over the door jingles as I step inside. A scruffy guy is hunched over the counter, broad-shouldered in worn flannel, with dark hair and a vibe that says he’d rather be left alone. I reach out to tap his shoulder anyway, but pause shy of making contact when I catch sight of my hands under the bright lights of the diner.

My lemon-yellow polish is chipped to hell, half-moons of color clinging on as though they’re as worn out as I am. I painted little smiling citrus faces on them the night before the funeral in the hopes that if my hands looked happy, maybe I wouldn’t fall apart.

They didn’t save me. Nothing did.

I curl my fist, tucking the brightness into my palm.

“Too cute.”

“Too much.”

“Not what a grown woman should wear on her hands.”

The comments echo in a chorus I’ve heard my whole life. Only Mom always smiled when she saw what new art I painted on them. She understood that they weren’t just nails but little pieces of me.