Page 91 of Picking Daisies on Sundays

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Why can I still hear your voice when you’re not here?

Today is Dad’s birthday, and I’m on my way to the cemetery before my senior exhibit this week. It was the first time I had visited him since the year he passed. It wasn’t my idea to go, but rather Mandy’s. When I returned from the wedding this week, she gave me a shoebox full of trinkets that were from Paris, all things Dad purchased when he visited Mom. One of them being mint sewing needles that matched the ones I used in my sewing kit that he gifted me.

It was one of the first real things I had seen of his in a long time. Proof that he existed and traveled and purchased things for himself not realizing that one day they’d just be things again, no longer his.

No one tells you how much losing someone feels like inheriting a dream. Because that’s what thinking of him felt like: a dream. For him to have been here for decades, and then to only exist in my pictures and memories. I’d like to imagine that if I hadn’t developed object permanence as a child, then maybe my mind would’ve had an easier time accepting that he wasn’t here anymore.

I hadn’t realized how much I was…avoiding this until I arrived at the cemetery, frozen in the parking lot. Should I have brought something? I always saw people bring beautiful bouquets and flags.

Mandy told me to talk to him, that’s all. But that was a lot easier in an email than talking to a headstone that was supposed to sum up the entire life of your father. I didn’t say that, of course. I simply got out of the car and walked on the path through the other headstones until I found him.

My throat tightened up. Looking down at the plot of grass in front of me, all I could picture was his bright smile. The one that made his eyes small, and his cheeks swollen when Mom accidently cracked her eggs into the trash instead of the bowl at least once a week. Or the time I was practicing softball in the backyard and sent a softball through the window, and he laughed so hard because I managed to land it in our bathroom trash barrel. Or when I got a C in the home ed class on sewing in middle school and he held onto me as I hiccupped with tears. When I told him he’d get better soon, holding his hand over the hospital bed as the skin on his hands became thinner and his cheeks hollowed out. Even when sick, he still managed to make the nurses laugh.

The muscles in my throat were wound up like rope, and my eyes collected and lost tears like a broken, ceramic tub. My hands shook and my knees buckled, hitting the hot grass. He’s dead. He’s been dead for years, and I never came and saw him because I was too scared of the past.

I opened my emails on my phone to where a folder of drafts sat.Hi Dad,they all started. Before I had another chance to think it over, I selected them all and clicked delete.

For a split moment, I regretted it. But then I looked back up where our last name was etched in stone. The beauty he gave that name even when he was suffering. My skin was oily as I wiped away the last of my tears and pressed my hand against the gravestone, as if there were some shred of him in there.

“Happy Birthday,” I whispered.

The grass brushing the skin on my legs and the humid wind knotting my hair became friends as I sat there talking to him, telling him how much I miss him, and why I haven’t visited, and why I won’t be again for a while.

My grief didn’t disappear after my visit. It’d never magically disappear, that’s not how grief worked. I didn’t leave the cemetery with a smile on my face or closure. But it felt like I conquered step one. I was learning how to face the things I couldn’t control, and how to let them go. How to not only hurt with my whole hurt, but how to feel with it, and accept those feelings. To not brush off my insecurities and concerns and sadness, but to exist with it and then face it. I was learning.

I imagine this is how Sarah felt the day of her wedding last week: so nervous she could feel bile in her throat. Making sure all my models had on the correct shoes that went with their dresses, and adjusting zippers and buttons, along with making sure I looked okay, which was the worst part of all. Why did I decide to participate in my own showing again? Oh, yeah, because Ethan sucks—I’ll make clothes for myself if I want to. When I say it like that, it started to feel worth it again.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the only nervous one. Sandra, Camille,

Lexi, and Vera were all equally as nervous. Even though they weren’t wearing one of their project pieces, they’d still have to walk out at the end with their models to be applauded and credited for their work. It made me feel better to have them here, brushing my shoulder as they walked by and prepared for the same thing.

“Hi gorgeous.” I turned and found Levi several feet behind me with a bouquet of daisies. My heart melted.

I ran into his arms. “You bought me flowers,” I pouted.

“Of course I did.” He stepped back and took in my dress. It was the color of clementines, appearing as sunlight that came in through windows and hit a white wall. It had the perfect summer glow to pair with my lighter dresses.

It felt weird saying it, but I was really proud of it, no matter how simple it was. I didn’t feel ashamed either to say that I felt beautiful. My shoulders looked strong, my legs appeared long, and my brown eyes looked brighter.

“Nervous?”

“I was actually thinking of escaping out the back, want to help?” I gave him a childish smile.

He laughed but recognized the true nerves in my eyes. He leaned towards me and pushed one of the thin straps off my shoulder, kissing my collarbone. It made me shiver. I grabbed onto his bicep to keep from tipping backwards. I could feel the other girls watching, ogling. It happened often when I was with Levi; it was hard to miss his presence. “You’re going to kill it, darling. Knock them out of the park.”

I smiled with my lips pressed together and leaned onto the balls of my feet to reach his lips. They tasted like coffee, and I indulged in it. “I didn’t say kill me,” he groaned against my lips.

It made me laugh.

But that’s what I did when I walked out with the rest of the models: I knocked them out of the park. My legs felt shaky as I followed them out and I felt the hot lights beaming down on my shoulders. But the people I found cheering me on was enough of a distraction, because I almost burst out into tears. Gabe, Jia, Mom, Mandy, Levi, Rhea, Claire, Trish,Josh, girls fromLook of the Weekand Sandra, Camille, Lexi, and Vera peeking their heads out from behind the curtains clapping and hollering. My skin was radiating with the warmth of their love. Happiness and joy riddled my smile and hurt my cheeks. The only person that wasn’t here, was watching from above. And I was confident that he’d be so proud of me. I was so proud of me.

I bowed as my models left the runway, and I smiled a smile that was brighter than a field of daisies.

Epilogue

“I once was poison ivy, but now I’m your daisy,”