Ana envied the walls. To think, to listen, to stand strong without affronts, instructions, or criticism. Her skin already shared its pasty cream color. Ana strategically chose light, unimposing outfits to further blend in. She sought ignorance and walled herself to achieve it. Her brown hair and eyes stuck out, despite sharing a glimmer of inoffensive cream. Her brown hair held two–maybe three clusters of sun damaged yellow hues. Her left eye alone displayed an amber streak. She hoped to exploit these wallifying abnormalities, but her tormenting mother grasped these browns as just that–plain brown. Constantly twisting and tying and pulling and setting them, she hid all remnants of cream. She shoved Ana's lone amber streak into a black hole. Without touching, Ana's puppeteer mother glided her arms around that dirty hair: pinning the bangs and breathlessly tying the rest into a painfully smooth knot.
As her mother pointedly placed a bottle of perfume on the nightstand, Ana tried to blend with the wall. “We can’t have you smelling like this rancid room you coop yourself up in each day.” With her mother’s puppet strings focused solely on Ana’s arms, she practiced her best walling with her eyes. She zoned out: hearing but not listening to her mother’s further demands, complaints, and projections. Her eyes yearned for escape, but her bangle scraped her arm and her neckband itched her neck. Placed hours before–before even the rose blush–, these distracted her eyes from their mission. Her mother spoke, and words dangerously emerged from the blank sound. Midway through dinner–mother would surely be sufficiently distracted by then–she could untangle herself from her mother’s stringing.
Each time her mother’s words reformed from her bland, muted abyss, Ana simply turned to the nearest wall to revitalize her mission. She spent nearly every “preparation hour” for each Saturday and Sunday of the past decade and a half developing these wall inspired dissociative techniques. Though limited, Ana took pride in her progress. She could block entire minutes out, whereas years ago mere clauses–with luck a short sentence–capped her capabilities. Ana never spoke of this. Verbalizing her project could only undermine it, and the walls never spoke anyway.
Ana lied when she told her mother–who had just left to tend to her own “finishing touches,”–that she would greet the guests with her father. Her mother would take another half hour at least. The cocktail hour itself would take an additional two before she could sit again. More importantly, her mother had the walls in the entrance hall painted light blue a few years back–tragically antithetical to Ana's wall blending aspirations.
When she was little, Ana blended much more. Her sun tinted hair, mixed seamlessly with the then ubiquitously light beige walls of the house. When she walked within them, they seemed to absorb her. When she spoke, few responded to her–even fewer addressed her without prompting. She ended up sitting silently at most functions. With no one to talk to, she absorbed and observed in complete stillness.
With the exception of her annual portrait, Ana’s mother paid little attention to her back then. Yearly in late September, the arrival of a dusty man with an ever curling and greying mustache marked young Ana’s most dreaded time of the year. As her sunlit yard hours began to dwindle with shortened daylight, her mother forced her to sit for days on end in complete stillness.
Ana hated sitting still, spending most of her days outside in her early youth. She found the house’s walls confining before she envied them. Outside, Ana liked to play with the grass. Grabbing and ripping apart blades of grass granted her hands an occupation and her mind an opportunity to roam freely.
During the portrait, she could not move her body. Her brain swirled in painful turbulence to compensate. After half of an hour the turbulence slipped through her mind and into her legs. She would twitch uncontrollably despite shouts from the painter to settle down.
The finished product of these paintings typically included a subtle, but painfully obvious grimace on Ana’s face. Her mother neglected to notice or care, for she hung them on the wall immediately, cementing Ana’s discomfort in the building blocks of the house.