The Five Steps: Denial
Note: This is a series of vignettes based on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
For the last six months she had been looking for an apartment in Seattle but was too scared to do anything about it. Things were bad. Really bad. There wasn’t a decision that would yield happy results, even the ones that counted as “right”. She turned the possibilities over and over in her mind and kept returning to - Seattle.
Seattle was always a pretend place to her, really.
When she was in the fourth grade she’d read a book about the Pacific Northwest and thought that it was still an untainted wilderness populated by tribes of Native Americans. She was disabused of this by the time she was fourteen and started her literary love affair with Tom Robbins. It was “Still Life with Woodpecker” that made her want to live in Seattle. The Seattle created by Robbins was interesting, beautiful, and filled with people that she knew would understand her. For years she read and re-read his books to visit that place as often as she could.
She always knew that the real city would never truly live up to her expectations. Cities have a way of changing and being different from what we want or need them to be. She finally chose to visit Seattle as an adult and found it to be just as beautiful as she imagined it might be. It was quickly dismissed as being a product of her obvious predisposition to look only for the good there. Living there was probably less amazing.
Making Seattle a real place where she could actually live would remove her ability to see it only as an Emerald Jewel. Something personal, something small enough to turn over in her hand and regard during times of sadness or stress.
She believed that when she died she would indeed go to Seattle. The woods would be lush and green, the people would be interesting and creative, there would be no worry, and she would finally belong somewhere.
Tags: creative writing