Spectrum
color.
When they ask me what is the meaning of life, I always say entropy and collision. Because we only exist in the universe because stars collided and space spread us out. Because humans bruised each other in every which way, proliferating their steps all over the world. I always thought I should be running hazardly through every place I’ve been, but Montreal tastes like beautiful city, ugly habits; and I have been indulging in discarding the people I’ve met. Causing craters, before looking for another person to turn into a shooting star. I know how many days I have been here, but all the times my aura changed color I can’t remember, I stopped measuring the effects of all these catalysts. I write their stories as if I have a right to them, as if I didn’t veer left away from the downpour, because everyone forgets about the disasters that proceed rainbows. Recognition feels like a heartfelt apology, and I have yet to figure out how colorblind I want to be when I revisit this year in my dreams.
red.
Red is the color of betrayal, because infidelity reigns in the liver toxic. And she pleads the fifth to avoid the eyes of the jury, because who gives a fuck about promises, when slurred words give an excuse to give a fuck? Yet, the guilt tainted hangovers incriminate the conscience —she could act as if she didn’t care at all, but then sobriety wouldn’t be a problem, and she wouldn’t have to pretend that she didn’t cross the lines of almost and what if. She is looking for a hero in her heroin. She put herself in rehab, but the system is corrupt, and they ran to each other over and over again.
orange.
Orange is the color of lights, because it takes seven painkillers to die, and she drowns in six, hoping to cut open and see the light at the end of the tunnel, in the way comatose patients feel when they stake their claim to the afterlife, but what do they know of PTSD? Orange runs in the oxygen-needing, oxygen-suffocating fire of the white lighter of black omens as he pulls smoke into his teeth. For his mouth is already stained by the lines he rehearses to get girls into bed, just to fulfill the craving of intimacy that exists nowhere else. He runs on cliches of good boy bad crowd. Because the twenty-seven club didn’t give a fuck about the eleven minutes each cigarette robbed. That sounds a lot like counting time, and no one needed those eleven minutes anyway.
black.
Black is the color of filth, because no matter how much time has passed, nothing hurts more than hearing her name on his lips. Don’t you know that best friends are off limits? Feeling like second best becomes second nature, and the search of validation permeates beyond the lines of attention, so when he promises that you were first pick and pulls your mouth onto his, the bitter taste of settling doesn’t leave your tongue, and the trapped air feels like suffocating into submission.
white.
White is the color of forgiveness, because I have spent too many nights watching the sunrise while guys pull me into their arms, whispering confessions into my ear. But I am not a priest. My body is not holy ground. I cannot save you from your sins. Maybe god is on both sides, because I tuck secrets into my lungs, becoming a collector to make up for the fact that when people realize I see them clearly, they run away. But it is so easy to reach ubiquitous truth through intimacy when the first thing a boy asks you is if kissing is passion or foreplay. In retrospect, I have always wished it was the latter, because it is much easier to rid names out of your memories when they fuck you instead of making you bite your lip.
green.
Green is the color of radiation, because people only change fifteen percent when they try, as souls disrupt any hope of interruption, and you learn to accept who you are. But I still believed we would spend decades shattering each other into glass shards. But you and I are a three bullet Russian roulette, and mutation seeps in when the shots are fired, and nothing breaks a mirror like I love you and goodbye. Still. Soul mates are the only ones who can change your eighty-five percent, and you have always been my favorite soulmate. When the bomb dropped, I doubted Hiroshima felt anything close to this, because the mushroom cloud didn’t hurt at all when compared to the silence we’ve been living in since. You used to call me your savior. You don’t call me that anymore. You don’t call me anything anymore. Are we anything anymore?