Too many subplots

I hit a grey place.

“No one cares.”

After that, there was nothing — no imagery, no feeling. Just absence.

This is not a prophecy.

It is an archaeological layer.

And grey does not mean dead. It means frozen. Frozen things can be warmed — slowly, safely, with witnesses.

I learned early that I could endure a lot if it kept other people safe. I was more afraid of inconveniencing others than of not being heard. Speaking up meant being a tattletale. We were told that keeping secrets was a kind of loyalty.

At some point, you stop trying. Not because you do not have anything to say, but because you understand no one will believe you anyway. They are stronger, louder. Their voices do not shake. Their skin is lighter. Their words land cleanly.

I am not trying to plant a garden in this frozen ground. I would not even know what seeds to choose, or what would sprout after years of neglect. That is the conundrum: when the ground finally thaws, do you tend to the weeds — or do you burn it all and begin again?

When my grandmother died, the ground was still frozen. I remember asking my mother how they would bury her. Her face pinched in a way I had never seen before. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

She looked like the fish I caught that summer.

I cried when I saw the hook in its tiny lip. My uncle scolded me while explaining how to remove it. I held the fish too long. It died in my hands. I had not set out to kill anything. I just wanted to go out in the boat with him.

I loved that little boat. The motor whirred and vroomed, sending dark rainbows swirling through the water. Sometimes the spray hit my face — cool, sudden, alive.

Out in the middle of the lake, he showed me how to bait the pole. He talked about his car, about how expensive my mother’s old Ford was to repair. I nodded, politely. He told me how pretty I was becoming, how well-mannered. I thanked him and told him he was too. He laughed and said I was an odd one.

I never meant to be a fish murderer.

My mother wore that same pinched expression when I asked how my mémé would be buried.

“She’ll be kept in the freezer,” she said, “until the ground thaws in the spring.”

I am not embalmed. I am not waiting for a plot to open. Not today, anyway. But this is how my brain disco-danced through the subject: frozen ground, frozen grief, frozen words. Preserved not because they were honored — but because there was nowhere to put them yet.

Grey does not mean finished.

It means paused.

And I think, maybe, I am finally standing at the edge of the thaw.