Aftermath of Dreaming by DeLaune Michel Read Free Book Online

exchanged, just suffocating my skin.
    I was wearing a black slip I’d found in a thrift store that a thin, red-faced, elderly man used to run. It was a tiny space filled entirely with clothes that were jumbled and jammed everywhere, no discipline or system in sight. The elderly man sat at a desk in the front, guarding against the clothes’ eventual onslaught.
    Being in that thrift store was a huge hue challenge for me. Ever since I learned the color wheel in fourth-grade art class, I have been in love with the logic of light and the order of shades that result from it. Crimson becoming red turning into orange changing to yellow. White is all and black has none. It was exhilarating to discover that color—such an old friend, one of the first and easiest distinctions to make—was not what it appeared to be at all: there and solid, preexisting and depending on nothing for its tone; but, in fact, was waves of light traveling at different speeds.
    Though I never could figure out how that made different shades, I’d try to imagine it. Would close my eyes and visualize light, would see its curvy cupid arrows moving through the air, but how that eventually made blue, I hadn’t a clue. Yet it was comforting that something as basic as green was gloriously, magically formed. From that point on, I beganputting my clothes into color wheel order. It made me feel part of the huge, silent rainbow dispersed everywhere all at once, and I could help, too, by putting the light waves in order of speed, a race always won.
    I have never cared about being organized; I just like decorous hues, so being in that thrift store was an ultimate challenge visually. I had a brief, wildly unpleasant idea of color-coordinating it for him, a kind of corporeal act of retail mercy, but wisely decided to just never go there again. The next time I drove by, the shop was closed, the clothes and old man gone, as if the whole thing had imploded from within.
    Anyway. On the day I wore the black slip and saw my mother’s forehead on a stranger in that furniture store, I had finally reached the refuge of my truck and was letting the sobs come out. It was horrendously hot, as I said, so the windows were down, and I was crying freely, safe in the false invisibility that vehicles provide, when suddenly a man stuck his head inside the cab and yelled, “Are you all right? Where’d they go?”
    I jumped in such fright it stopped my tears.
    â€œYou were attacked, weren’t you, miss? I seen you walking down the street, half your clothes gone, shakin’ and cryin’.”
    I tried to comprehend what he was saying. He looked about seventy, with clipped white hair on a dark head, and wore neat pants and shirt with a green sports jacket too heavy for the temperature. I glanced down at my slip. The strong sun made my legs completely visible through its thin inky silk, and it suddenly became all too clear what the old man had thought my crying was about.
    â€œOh, God, no,” was all I could say. It was impossible to explain that an inappropriate clothing choice had happened to coincide with a really bad day, so I just threw my truck into gear and drove away, leaving him staring after me in confused dismay.
    Thus began my own kind of “light checks.” Not as stringent as Momma’s, but not as lax as before. Though occasionally I will change clothes in my truck—or my shirt, I should say. Some days, when it seems as if every article of clothing I own has transformed itself into an item I suddenly loathe, I give myself backup. I go out in whatever is mycurrent favorite—even though it doesn’t feel like a favorite, like eating food you love with a cold and having to remind yourself the whole time how it really does taste—with a couple of options brought along in case I decide that I could be happy if only I were wearing that other shirt.
    And I watched Momma do her own version of this while I was growing