Sibyl

Sibyl was an amazingly sad woman.

Most people did not know that about her. Did not suspect it even. Because she was a supreme actress. She lived and breathed the anthem of the melancholy Jacques.

Sibyl was an artist. She had always been an artist. Of whatever medium seemed appropriate at the time. Painting. Fabric design. Sculpture. Performance art. Pottery.

Now she was the diva of decorative tiles.

Sibyl had found her niche. Quite by accident. But all the same. She had a studio behind her house up on the hill overlooking Delphi. She had her own kiln. Where she fired up the tiles she designed to meet the needs of her many customers. And many customers she had!

Sibyl was normally booked solid six to nine months ahead of time. She made kitchen, bathroom, pretty much any room tiles to the specifications of her myriad customers. She had done vineyards, bucolic scenes, flowers, still lives, motorcycles, Disney tableaus, you name it. There was really nothing Sibyl could not, or would not, do in tile. Except the same exact job over again. She had her own website and was well-renowned in the interior decorating and tile world. As Trey would phrase it, Sibyl was on top of her game.

She was also incredibly sad.

Her partner Esther had died five years before from breast cancer. Esther had been a poet, a well-known and respected poet, many said next in line for Poet Laureate of the United States. She and Sibyl had met in Provincetown one summer about fifteen years ago. Esther had been a good deal older than Sibyl. But it hadn’t mattered. They had been made for each other.

Even Sibyl’s mother, the late Vera Noddington Taylor, a straight-laced Delphi society marm, had admitted as much one day to her blue blood bridge partners at the country club. Sibyl, much to her chagrin, might “be that way,” but there was no doubt that Sibyl and Esther were soul mates. Not that Vera really believed in soul mates, mind you, but if there were ever two people destined to be together it was Sibyl and Esther.

So spoke Vera.

Sibyl had been quite lost since the death of Esther. She tried to conceal it.

She did pretty well.

Most of the time.

No one knew of the nights where she lay, curled up in a ball on the cool tiles of her kitchen floor, devastated, hysterical, immobile.

No one knew of the emptiness. The loneliness. The despair.

Those words might seem extreme, hyperbolic even. But to Sybil they were everyday reality, the norm.

She liked staying busy.

She liked the constant demands for tile.

She liked how she could plot out large images onto smaller squares and then create tiles one by one. Paint them. Fire them. Assemble them. Mail them off.

And make someone else’s day.

So what if it wasn’t her own?

She was doing something worthwhile, something that mattered. Something that Esther would have loved.

To Sibyl, her tiles formed intricate poems. Stories. Memories. Hopes and dreams.

At the same time, she often thought that making them was the only thing that kept her going.