The Mustard Chair

She shifted in the chair she had selected to write in. It was mustard yellow and old. A hand-me-down from her mother’s house, and before that, bought second, or third, or fourth hand at a thrift store. Things always had a way of inspiring and holding weight with her. Not because she was materialistic, but because they were tactile versions of the emotions clouding her brain. She could clean her things, and move them, and manipulate them, and rearrange them, and make them orderly.  In a way, they helped her to do the same for her emotions. But it required a lot of time of repose. Of solitude and of relaxation. It required stillness and silence. A shutting out of sorts. Those times are difficult to come by these days. Even when you obtain them, they can easily be laid to waist by the handheld blue light we all so contagiously glance down at. The tiny window that we hold in the palms of our hands that stimulates us with other people’s daily activity and of all the things they are doing that we aren’t and that we may never do. What an interesting time to be alive. 

Anyway. The mustard chair. It had been a while since she had chosen it as the spot from which she would create. After all, it was the spot of so many past painful realizations. It was the safest place she had had at the time, but now it taunted her most nights, as she sat on the couch across from it. She saw in its dated, yellow, corduroy seat, a reminder of the lies she had told herself. It sat like a cat curled up and lazy, falling in and out of sleep while she worked tirelessly to find a new source of inspiration that wasn’t dependent upon great pain and heartache, and lies and too much drinking. So today, she decided to take over the seat, so that those old memories wouldn’t have a spot to curl up. She wrote about what was most painful to her in the most poetic language she could devise. Language that wasn’t really relevant to the time. The words weren’t incredibly sophisticated, but the way she spun them was of a different era all together. One where vice wasn’t stylish. And being truthful, especially to oneself, was valued more than telling lies for the sake of the harm they would bring to further adventure and exploration. 

She thought about where she had come from and how far she had traveled to get to where she now was. Isn’t it interesting how no matter how much time passes we still have the inner voice we had as a child? It’s vocabulary has enhanced, but it’s vulnerability is just the same. Her inner voice was ever-questioning and at times painfully insecure. Oftentimes she found herself dwelling so much on her past pain, that she spoiled certain moments in her present. Like the time she was told she was the most beautiful woman in the world by the one man she knew really meant it.