divorce is grey

it's almost funny when before your eyes everything begins to fall

and then you realize a year has passed since it was all normal

and you can still taste the fear of how it feels to Lose

because for once in eons you're with both of them together

but now it's stale.

everyone says pain is red, but for you it is steely grey.

and everything begins to flood back as you stand in your sea of grey.

you fall

through the life that was once fresh and entirely yours but now presents itself as stale.

for seventeen years your life was comfortable and you taught yourself to forget that your ordinary might not always be normal,

that the fact was that your parents might not always stay together.

for years you didn't know what you had to lose.

but one day it all came loose.

at the end of february of your junior year, you saw the beginnings of grey.

you'd lived in one place with Your Parents and Your Brother for all your life (at least, until Brother went to college), but they told you that now there wouldn't be The Family together,

so maybe you weren't surprised when they told you he was moving out, that it was a trial, that maybe divorce would come and maybe it wouldn't but you knew, you always knew, that it would, and that's why, just then, you didn't let many tears fall.

and your normal

turned stale.

you didn't know that life could taste stale.

you didn't know that there were the little things, clothes and shoes you would lose

because living in two places would become normal.

you got in your car and you followed your father to his new apartment and you'd never forget that the truck he rented was green, yet still everything stayed grey.

you listened to a song called "leave" as you drove away from your house and from inside your car, you watched the rain fall

and you thought that maybe you could handle this all better if your brother weren't miles away at school, because til then, you'd faced all challenges together.

but you were in a family of one-and-a-half now, instead of four together,

and eating at a different dinner table half the time made food stale.

somehow you made it through that semester and your grades didn't fall,

but straight A's didn't mean that you won. it felt like life had already determined that you would lose.

your vision barely brightened over the summer--you couldn't quite get rid of the grey

hues that had taken over your mindset and settled in as normal.

a year later, you thought you were used to the odd normal

but part of you still wonders if you should call them "my mom" and "my dad" instead of "my parents" together

and sometimes things go grey

and you fight to keep from letting your life go stale

and you have told yourself that when you move away in eighteen, in twelve, in six months, it'll be impossible to further lose

any part of your family. and true, moving away is a risk, but it is something for which you are so much more willing to fall.

things were beginning to seem normal and you hoped you were losing that unwriteable thing that made your life stale.

but tonight, when you saw them together, you felt your seams come loose.

and though things turned grey, you decided writing would save you, yet again, from the fall.