Tiffany Dahl

Yellow

Sitting across from him at the dinner table, her head tilted to the side with feigned interest, she listened to the same words he had spoken earlier that day. His voice was still intoxicating, soothing and warm; his hands moving with animation and enthusiasm as he told the story of his recent encounter with a vegan waitress. She knew the punch line; she had already cringed internally knowing how the waitress would have looked down upon him with both disgust and pity. He wouldn’t have noticed, oblivious to the reactions of others. That was how he was, how he always had been. Someone once described the feeling to her as ‘yellow’; the way your heart breaks for someone when they cannot see that others are laughing at them, not with them. That once they walk away from a crowd, whom they thought they had been entertaining, the crowd would roll their eyes at them behind their back and giggle, while they go about their day with blissful ignorance. He was a good man, but so often for him she felt yellow.