Rediscovering Passion

June in Athens is hot. Not the kind of hot that the sweat dribbles down your forehead to the tip of your nose either. The hot where your entire face is drenched and shimmering against the sun, your shirt sticks to your body and you feel that you might pass out if you spend another minute in the heat.

Granted, every summer day in Georgia isn’t this miserable, but most are and today was no exception. I’d gone inside three times already to gulp down a full glass of lemonade. Each time Drake would meet me at the door, his tail wagging at high speed, and follow me into the kitchen. I stood there wiping the sweat from my forehead with my t-shirt. Drake stared up at me, his ears perked and his head cocked to one side as if to say, “I want to go outside and play too.” I sat down Indian style on the kitchen floor, level with his panting mouth and scratched his ears. “I’m sorry buddy, it’s just too stinking hot outside today” knowing full well he had no idea what I was saying.

I found myself talking to my Golden Retriever more often these days. It’s been almost six months that Robert has been gone, but I still can’t get used to living alone. For months after the accident I didn’t touch anything in the house. His coat still hung on the hook next to back door; his toothbrush was still in the drawer by the sink. My mother had told me to pack everything up. She said to take it to the Salvation Army or give it to someone. That was closure, how we dealt with losing someone. I couldn’t do it, not entirely anyway. After about a month I did pack away what was lying around the house. His coat, shoes, the book lying on the bedside table, still open to page 126. It was Nocturne, something about the Cold War and a conspiracy theory, he had told me.

I tried to put away everything, but I left reminders here and there, most hidden from any guests. In my own way, that’s how I held on to him. I remember the day I took the last box up to the attic. It was filled with baseball cards he had collected as a boy. He said one day when we had a son, he’d give them to him. I put the box on the floor and stood there. Until that point I hadn’t truly faced the fact that he was gone. Maybe it was the shock wearing off, I don’t know, but as I stared out the attic window to the driveway below it hit me.

My husband was dead.

My legs may have well crumbled beneath me. I dropped to the floor and laid my chest across the box, my arms beneath my face. I cried. Harder than I did the day the Sheriff’s department called to tell me about the accident, harder than at the funeral and all the days since then. I cried for him, for us, for everything that we’d never have. Every inch of my body trembled. I had never felt so alone and empty.

I lay there for almost an hour. When I finally rose to my feet, my eyes were puffy and sore, dark strands of hair matted against my wet face. I took a deep breath and made a promise to myself that I’d try and put my life back together.

Months later, I went back to the gallery for the first time. My assistant Carol had been handling things since I’d been away. I took a few pieces that I’d finished before the accident but my heart wasn’t in it. I regretted the long hours I spent in the studio above the garage. I’d lock myself away for hours painting. Robert would come up every now and then to check on me. I’d be covered in oil paint, and he’d laugh. That child like giggle that always made me smile, even if he was laughing at me.

The gallery had only been open for six months but at that point I didn’t care if it closed. Despite my attic promise, I felt like a lost child. I wanted to go back to Chicago, back to my mother and pretend life in Athens never existed. Carol brought me back to reality.

“Sydney, the art fair is coming up in a few weeks, are we going to take any pieces over?”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea. It’ll give the gallery some recognition.” I said half-heartedly.

Carol looked at me as though she wanted to ask a thousand things and that was all that came out. She had always reminded me of my Aunt Margaret. She had the same short dark hair, speckled with gray. Her wire-rimmed glasses always slipped to the end of her nose. She never looked at you through them, as if they were only an accent piece to her face. I’d met her while she was still working at the library. She always complained about them not giving her enough time off. When I mentioned I was opening a gallery downtown, she seemed like the right person to help me out.

“Hon, are you sure you’re ready to come back here?” She questioned me.

“I have a business, I have to move on Carol.”

“That sounds like a comment your mother would make. You move on when you’re ready Sydney, and if you aren’t please tell me, you know I can hold the fort down here until you want to come back.” She said, looking at me with concern in her eyes.

“Thank you, but I have to get out of the house. I’m trying to put my life back together.”

I had tried. I bought Drake the same week I had the courage to pack up my dead husband. I needed a companion, even if his only source of communication was to lick my face. He also gave me some security. Living alone took some getting used to.

The gallery had been slow to start off but Athens is a city so rich in creativity and vision that an art gallery did well downtown. It was always filled with a handful of curious window shoppers or tourists. Carol was a magnificent sales woman; she could sell one of my paintings to a blind man without blinking an eye.

It never quite left me though. The emptiness was always there, poking me in the side as if to remind me that now, all I had was a business. My social life had slowly deteriorated. Most of the couples that Robert and I were friends with seemed to extend their reach just a bit. The men didn’t have Robert to talk sports and politics with and the women feared that if they talked about their upcoming wedding anniversary or the fact that they were trying to have kids, I’d break down sobbing right then and there.

I traced figure eights with my finger on the unfinished cotton canvas I was standing in front of.

“I have to go run some errands, I’ll be back in a couple hours,” I lied.

I slung my bag over my shoulder and waved at Carol as I passed through the open front door.

I made my way down Clayton Street past the bars, restaurants and assorted galleries and boutiques that lined the heart of Athens. It was unseasonably warm that day, a relief from the suffocating heat that had plagued us for the past week. I thought about spending the day wandering the art museum checking out their newest exhibits. Then I decided against it and turned into a small coffee shop that had caught my eye at the last second. I usually went to one across town and had never been in here before.

Jazz music buzzed over the speakers. The shop was sprinkled with intellectual types reading or pegging away at their laptops. There were about five tables in the center all occupied, surrounding them were vintage couches and chairs. I ordered a latte from the pudgy teenager behind the counter and sat by the window, watching the people walk by. Couples, children, mothers and grandparents. Most seemed consumed in their conversations with one another. Others beset with their own thoughts as they scurried past alone.

I forgot what it was like to hurry back to work before the lunch hour expired or mull over choices for dinner that evening. I was living life at a pace that was utterly foreign to me. I had no dinner commitments, no phone calls to expect, no reason to leave work early and rush home. Nothing. I was convinced this was the beginning of depression. It had to be. When your entire body felt like a cloudless sky and not a trace of anything meaningful, beautiful or worthy could be found in it. I didn’t care if I ever got married again or had children. I didn’t care if I ever loved again. What was the point? I loved and look at me now. Sitting alone in a coffee shop anxiously awaiting my demise.

It seemed so much easier that way, why connect yourself to someone, they always disappear in the end. I thought of when my father left and how my mother must have felt. I was too young to understand that he really wasn’t coming back. I unrelenting colored him pictures, tearing them out of my book and saving them in my dresser drawer until he came back, arms open for me. My mother knew the truth but couldn’t face it. She couldn’t bear to be the breaker of my heart. So instead, little by little it broke, one piece at a time. Until I had lost all hope of seeing him again. I’d held onto hope once and I wasn’t doing it again. Cut right to the chase, my future held loneliness and misery. I couldn’t have made it simpler for myself.

I must have chuckled out loud, finding humor in my own self-pity. I noticed a man at a table across the room from me look up from his book in my direction. I looked back out the window; maybe he’d think I was laughing at something outside. Evidently he didn’t, because he was now walking toward my table. I rolled my eyes and considered getting a Do Not Disturb sign to hang from my neck.

“Hi, are you Sydney Jacobs?” He asked, stopping next to the table.

“What’s it to you?” I questioned in an uninterested tone. Had I just said that? I felt like reaching around and patting myself on the back. I was beginning to like this “new me” not only callous but also rude.

I could see by his expression that he hadn’t expected the response I gave. His eyes were stunned but he didn’t falter.

“Hi, my name is Eric, Eric Riley” he said with a smile, extending his hand.

“Hi Eric”

“I have one of your paintings hanging in my living room.” He said brightly. The old Sydney would have been friendly and appreciative of his purchase and interest in her creativity. She would have recognized that he was an attractive man. From where I was sitting I guessed he was every bit of 6’2” with sandy blonde hair that had no real design on his head, as though he woke up and ruffled his hands through it and walked out the door. His eyes were brown and welcoming and his teeth, white as my “snow” oil paint, probably the product of some over the counter bleach.

But this Sydney, she didn’t care. He was just another man, the last thing on her to-do list. Right under sell the house and move to Wyoming to join a cult.

“Great.” I said, staring back out to the sidewalk.

“I was thinking about buying another one, but I haven’t seen you at the gallery in a while and I wanted to tell you how much I liked the piece I bought.”

He wasn’t budging and I was staggered at how nasty I was being to what could be a repeat buyer.

“Now I know. If you’re interested in anything else, Carol can help you, she’s my assistant.” I swirled my finger in the froth of my latte and brought it up to my mouth and licked it off.

“Ok, thanks.” He muttered.

If Carol was there, she’d checked my temperature by now. I hadn’t talked with a buyer since I came back and I knew why, they bored me. Of course you liked the damn painting, why else would it be hanging on your wall?

I stood up and reached over to grab my bag. “I’ve got to go.” I hung my bag on my arm and walked past him.

* * * *

I wandered blindly through another couple weeks, barely conscious of what was going on around me. In the meantime, I had discovered a passion in 19th century poetry. I was reading everything from Mathilde Blind’s The Heather on Fire to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Ode to a Friend. I read two books a week, sometimes more. I was consumed in the reflection and emotions of the poems. At times I didn’t make it out of the library before I’d finished 40 pages of a collection. Painting had taken a backseat to my obsession of literary ramblings that I couldn’t fully understand. When I tried to paint I could only think of Robert.

I had never found an interest in poetry and therefore couldn’t relate it at all to my past life. I felt like I was reinventing myself. I’d absorb myself in the books, reading and re-reading every line until I could formulate my own meaning.

I was curled up in my armchair on a Saturday afternoon and it seemed that the phone would never stop ringing.

“Hello,” I snapped after pushing the talk button for the fourth time that day.

“Hi darling”

It was my mother. I glanced at my watch, two o’ clock on a Saturday. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She called to remind me of my brother’s birthday. For the 21 years he’d been alive, I’d never once forgot it. Evidently she thought this was the year.

I hung up the phone and realized I needed some fresh air. I called for Drake and within seconds he was bouncing into the living room, ears perked. I changed into shorts and a t-shirt, grabbed his leash and went for a run. Despite the suffocating heat, it felt good to get out. I tried to run regularly, I liked the energy that radiated through my body once I started down the street.

Ten minutes into it and I was sure I was going to be Athens newest heart attack victim. I didn’t think Drake was too far behind either. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and bent over, panting. I put in a good solid effort, we were walking home. My head was still between my knees when I heard him.

“Sydney?”

I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t be sure. I looked up, through squinty eyes, I remembered his face from the coffee shop a few weeks ago, but couldn’t recall his name.

“Hi” I smiled. The truth is I did feel sort of bad for how I had treated him that day. Not to mention, I was embarrassed by my clear lack of any athletic ability.

His attention shifted to Drake. “What a nice looking dog.”

I looked over, Drake was chasing his tail, and I was still in the puking position.

“Thanks,” I muttered, standing up. I thought it might be a good idea to try and make up for my attitude at the coffee shop.

“So what brings you to this neighborhood?” I asked.

“I live here, this is my front yard.” He smiled. There were those Colgate teeth again.

The mail in his hand should have clued me into that, not to mention, he didn’t have any shoes on.

“I live just over on Hickory,” pointing in the direction of my house.

“I know.” He grinned, his eyes locked on mine.

I raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“I’ve driven past before, while you were out gardening.” The intense eye contact made my stomach do a flip-flop.

I nodded my head and looked down at Drake. He couldn’t quite catch it.

“I should go,” I couldn’t tell if he was flirting or just being neighborly. I imagined with my sweat-streaked face and matted hair; it was the latter.

“Are you sure? I could get you a glass of water.” He offered.

Okay, so maybe he was flirting. Even so I didn’t know what to do about it, or if I even wanted to do anything at all.

“I’m fine, but I appreciate the offer.” I smiled and walked past. Drake sauntering beside me.

Alright, who was I trying to kid? This was the first guy that had shown me attention in months and I was enjoying it. I couldn't deny that.

However, I would not be taking that route for my daily jogs anymore. The mere thought of trying to start over was scaring the hell out of me.