Red

This colour is sexy and alluring. It is being rich and mysterious; bold, but not tacky or flashy; sophisticated yet mischievous. It is elegant fangs tearing the flesh of an apple, tearing the flesh of someone’s throat; a tongue lapping up the life that throbs from the carotid artery. Someone is watching you, and they are fascinating and dangerous. Do you indulge or not? It is natural to indulge. It makes your senses prick wildly. It electrifies you, makes you feel alert again. What will come from this?

The colour of passion; the colour of carnal, wet desire. It is the spark in your stomach and between your legs when you finally see the person you want to kiss. You want to rip off their clothes, press their warm skin against yours, and tuck yourselves under the duvet so that warmth can’t be lost to the jealous air. Every second you are apart feels like hours, and every hour you are apart feels like days. Time drags like feet through the sand. Your time apart lasted far too long, and it shows in the way you intertwine your pieces - all your pieces. As you graze each other's bodies with gentle fingertips, peaceful and content, you imagine staying in this moment forever.

It’s the colour that coats your insides when you see the same fight coming to repeat itself, coming to repeat the same old arguments. You are forever building up to it, forever on edge. It spirals again, and everything loses all meaning. It is the colour of endless cycles that lead nowhere, achieve nothing, serve no purpose except to swell your pain and force tears into your ducts. It is repeated failures and disappointments. You have to snap - everything snaps eventually, and why not you? It is the molten anger pouring out in raised voices, balled fists, salty tears, hateful words. It is the moment you retreat to your room, slam the door, and ponder the satisfaction of what you have done. But it does not come. You retain pent up anger that demands releasing. So then where do you put it? On anything you think will help release it: your belongings, your room, yourself. It is hot.

It ends with his fists on your face, his skin breaking under your nails, cutting track marks down his back. Different pain, but it’s all the same colour. It ends in a fight that you would have never won, because you could never overpower a hockey player. It is the ropes of sanity holding his broken brain together finally fraying like hair in heat. What can you do except watch the colour drain from your trembling body? And you see that same colour everywhere as you get dressed, and he departs, leaving you behind with open wounds which ultimately serve a purpose: a reminder that you need to protect yourself. You make a hard decision, and you tell him that he needs to vacate your life. Permanently. He reacts poorly, but you are not shocked - he is not the first. He says he will drink and drive until he crashes his car and dies, and your only wish is that he kills nobody else. The first guy said he would jump. At least he was not being selfish.

It is the colour that engulfs you when you think of this later, once you have years of distance between you and him, once you have processed all the things that occurred to you in your therapists generic room, once you have spoken them aloud and heard the words: ‘That’s not normal.’

It isn't?

It is realizing you have been abused, mistreated, and misled your whole life. People like taking advantage of you. They think you to be childish and naïve, and maybe you were, once upon a time, but that has all been stolen from you. You will never be that person again. And you finally realize all this with a surge of anger so powerful it brings you to a new peak, a new level of clarity, where you stand and wonder if it is your fucking right to be this angry. Anyone who tells you otherwise will see your anguish transformed into an armour of wrath, and then they will understand. It is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is a colour that consumes all your senses. It pulls tricks on you, shrouding your eyes with cloth that changes your vision. It changes you, makes you act in ways that are unfamiliar to you. It creates a stranger out of you. It is an ungodly colour; an unearthly colour; an unhealthy colour. It is plump and violent, so ripe and ready to be devoured by your own expectant fangs that it would be unfair if you could not. Does the satisfaction outweigh the guilt and embarrassment?

Overall, you find that it does not.

And when you realize that, this colour becomes the shame that fills you.