The Alchemy of Letting Go by Amber Morrell

Author:Amber Morrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
Published: 2023-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

I slip out of my bedroom at midnight. Ingrid’s room is beside mine and hasn’t been used since she died. A sign hangs on her door that says INGRID LANE with a silhouette of a dolphin. She got it on a family trip to Sea World. Mom keeps the door handle dusted, so it looks just as clean as any of the other door handles, shiny and golden, as if we go in all the time. But the truth is that the room is the same as it was two years ago.

When I push open the door, the air smells stale. The air doesn’t smell like Ingrid anymore. Ingrid smelled like moist earth and salt air. Like home. I can remember it clearly, but the smell is long gone.

Ingrid was two years older than me, and it’s been two years since she died. It hits me that I’m her age now. That the room I’m in belonged to a girl just like me, in the seventh grade, figuring out where to sit at lunch and how to make friends. I wonder if Ingrid hated poetry. A thrill runs through me when I realize that tomorrow night, I’ll be able to ask her.

Ingrid always kept her bed made and her room tidy. Her desk is exactly as she left it—pens lined up in a row beside a notebook, papers stacked tidily in the corner. Mom and Dad come in to vacuum the floor and dust the shelves every once in a while, since Ingrid hated dust. Everything had to be clean.

Her walls are papered with drawings. I’d forgotten that Ingrid liked to draw. She didn’t consider herself an artist, even though she was very good at it. “I’m just drawing what I see,” she’d say. The pictures on the walls are all of things in nature, bugs and strange flowers and interesting plants. They’re as anatomically correct and perfectly proportioned as can be. But what really stand out are her butterflies.

I consider myself a decent nature sketcher, but Ingrid’s butterflies are beautiful and vivid and flawless. She’s captured the delicate fuzz of the abdomen and the gentle curve of the proboscis, the long, tubular mouth. Almost all of them are of her favorite lepidoptera—the Palos Verdes Blue. She has dozens of drawings, all from different angles. I remember now the hours she spent drawing, frustrated that she could never get it just right.

The Blue was Ingrid’s favorite butterfly, and blue was her favorite color. Her bed is blue, her chair is blue. She wanted to paint her walls blue, but Mom said no. Whenever we went to the hardware store, we’d look at paint chips together. Ingrid skipped past colors like “robin’s egg” and “summer sky.” None of them were perfect. None of them were Palos Verdes Blue.

There’s a jewelry box on her dresser, but I won’t find something meaningful there. Ingrid didn’t like wearing jewelry. I consider taking down one of the pictures of the butterflies, but that doesn’t seem right either.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.