Colors

I can't live without color. I can't live in black or white, though those two are very important. I can't live without color, not because I fear losing them, but because they all remind me of him.

When I hear the color brown, I do not think of the earth or a brown bear or all the traditional things you think of when you hear the color brown. I think of his eyes and his couch and the sky that day when the world felt like it was ending; when the world was whipping us dead.

It tore us to pieces and only left bleached bones as white as the smoke that floats from his cigarettes that I hate. White as the moon was on that night the ground almost failed him. As white as his eyes glowed in the dark when he looked down at me as the ground almost failed me too.

That night was as black as his hair and his irises in the dark. Black as his pants and his lighter and that park. Black as the asphalt we walked on one night. The night with black smiling faces on orange heads that watched as we walked passed.

And those orange beings remind me of the glow that the streetlights cast on his face as we drove and drove and drove with no real place to go. Orange as the city lights in the distance as we jumped that fence to see the world before us. Orange as the enchanted place that led us far astray. When I see the color orange I think of the candy bar accidentally left tucked between my heart and home.

Somewhere before home and a little past heart a purple hat was found. He set it upon my head, positioned the "right way." That hat was as purple as the bruises sprinkled across my knuckles that his fingertips brushed. He did not find them nor the purple and blue veins webbing through my cold hands ugly. He said they were proof that I was alive under a blue moon.

When I think of blue I think of the dark hue of his shirt. And I think of that one night in that backyard with all of us running. How he hurt me accidentally with flying blue. I laughed in his scared and sorry face, tugging on his blue shoes. I assured him of my well being and hid the rising blue. But as blue as the bruise was, nothing was as blue as the book that passed between hands.

When my hand brushed his as I passed him that book nothing was as pink as my cheeks. He gave me that wry grin with his pink lips. I think of when he laughed at my pink skin that was abused by the sun when I was a thousand miles away.

And on one sunny fall afternoon when shadows were so easily cast, the yellow leaves rained from above as he arrived; passenger in an old truck. And they reminded me of how yellow that lost star was that I gave to him so long ago, and how he plucked it from its hiding place only a day before. He watched from his window as I looked toward the sky as if it would appear there. Instead I found myself looking in the face of the yellow sun. And all I could think was that those rays would bleach his hair in six months time to a dark brown he could not deny.

Oh, but he'll try to cover it with a swath of red. A red as bloodshot as his sleepless eyes. As red as the cans he so cherished, yet kept him sleepless. They were as red as my footsteps that he just didn't understand with the shake of his head.

Just like he used to shake his head in his green-walled prison and my green-walled salvation. There were the laughs that echoed through as we broke free to what we thought was greener grass on the other side. Now we are free from the place I ran into and he marched out of; free from that rolling green hill that sometimes was our downfall. And now we must fight for our connection because sometimes things just aren't that easy to hold onto.

And now my gray eyes reflect back in his and I think I might finally understand the meaning of this color. Because now the memories are fading and all the edges are becoming a gray haze. But I cannot love without color so I will paint this page with words left unsaid. It is not colors I can't live without. It's simply just him.