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────010, atonement.
WHEN CLEO WAS YOUNGER, HER MOTHER OFTEN TOLD HER TO TAKE PRIDE in self-care when one needed it the most, tender loving to your own physical body and mentality just as important as remembering to wake up and get out of bed, even if that's all you could muster, during your most difficult times, and even if you don't think you need the attention. Chances are, Lucy had told her once when she was twelve, you need it more than you think. There was a mantra that went with it, one that Cleo did not if her mother had conjured up but had taken near and dear to her little heart when, one day when she was only a small child of five years old and upset over something vague she cannot remember (though, if she thinks long and hard enough, she concludes it might have been because she was too scared to sleep late one night after having a bad dream), and told her that whenever she's anxious or scared or confused to repeat to herself a single prominent thought until all her worries faded away in the distraction. I acknowledge the thought, it's just like a wave; I watch it go up, and then float away.
And they were not just empty pretty words. Cleo saw it often━━the way in which Lucy Bennett made certain to find time to appease herself amidst taking care of two rambunctious children, being a loving wife to a besotted husband always away for work, and lending a helping hand to her mother as they continued to run the Sertori hotel all on their lonesome. Cleo remembers Lucy's favourite thing was to take baths whether she was having a good or bad day, filling the home with an array of floral scents from lavender to jasmine and everything in between, oftentimes emerging with wilted petals from her bath still tangled in her locks. Other times, Lucy could be heard humming to herself in a jovial song━━a secret of a talent that she always tried to smother, too embarrassed to share her voice with the world; but if Cleo and Wesley were paying close attention, they could catch the remnants of her siren like melody, especially on the days she was extra happy.
Above all else━━and certainly Cleo's favourite trait of her mother's━━was Lucy's love for the art, particularly painting on canvases, but she enjoyed all sorts of different mediums. Charcoal sketches in crumpled notebooks, clay pottery, chalk pastels, oil paints, acrylic paints, watercolours, and so on. It was not uncommon to find Lucy meticulously involved in her work in the middle of the living room, or on the porch, or in their front yard, an old raggedy tarp splayed out beneath her already splattered with dried splotches of paint of various shades and whatever sort of canvas she was working on for the day, and flecks of colour dotting her skin and her hair as she often forgot she had paint on the digits of her fingers and would push back her hair or wipe her hands on her clothes. Her paintings were always bright and pleasant, depicting nature in all its glorious beauty or abstract pieces of figures on beaches or in the water or simply just aimless strokes of paint creating an impressionistic portrait.
