Her Favorite Color Was Goodbye

She never stayed in one place for too long.

My aunt Lila was a storm dressed in vintage denim and silver bangles that jingled like a secret language. She blew into town every couple of years, all laughter and silk scarves, and vanished just as quickly—leaving behind only the faint scent of patchouli and questions no one dared to ask.

She never married. Never explained where she went. Never gave a reason for the postcards she sent from cities she hadn’t really visited. “Postmarks lie,” she once whispered to me, winking. I was twelve then, still too young to understand what kind of life someone could stitch from leaving.

But I loved her.

Everyone else in the family treated her like an open wound—something they were tired of tending to. But to me, she was magic. The kind of person who’d turn an ordinary afternoon into a treasure hunt, just by pulling thread from her pocket and saying, “Let’s sew some sunlight into this day.”

When she died, it was quieter than she ever was in life.

A neighbor found her in a rented apartment in New Mexico, alone but surrounded by scraps of fabric, bundles of thread, and an old sewing machine that looked like it had lived several lives.

My mother didn’t want to go. “She wouldn’t have wanted a fuss,” she said. “Let the landlord deal with it.”

But I went.

I owed her that much.

The apartment was small, sunlit, and smelled faintly of sage. No furniture except a table, a chair, and a mattress on the floor. But the walls were alive—with color, with texture, with stories. She had tacked up dozens of small fabric squares, each one hand-stitched with words, symbols, or fragments of something almost lost.

I stood there, hand over my mouth, as if I’d just stepped into a shrine no one else knew existed.

On the table was a box labeled in her sharp, slanted handwriting: "For Z."

Inside were more scraps—torn cloth, hand-dyed silk, pieces of her story. Attached to each was a note, stitched on with red thread.

"From the sari I wore in Calcutta—1993. I danced on a rooftop with someone who called me brave."

"A corner of the dress I wore when I left your uncle. He didn’t break my heart—I set it free."

"This one? Paris. I never learned French, but I did learn to say no."

I sat for hours, unspooling her life from those fragments. Each one was a memory, a goodbye dressed in color.

And then I found the last piece.

A square of soft blue cotton, fraying at the edges, the thread barely holding. The note read:

"This is from the dress I wore the day I met you, Z. You were three. You held onto my leg like I was the whole world. You were the only one who ever asked me to stay. I didn’t—but I never stopped wishing I had."

I cried. I wept in that empty room, surrounded by her ghost in linen and lace.

She had been running all her life—not from people, but from the weight of staying. Some people are built for roots. Lila was made of wind and thread. Her goodbyes weren’t abandonment; they were her way of loving gently, at a distance.

I brought the scraps home with me.

I didn’t tell my mother. I just quietly started sewing them together into a quilt—messy, uneven, full of mistakes and memories.

Each square was a farewell, but together, they made something whole. Something warm. Something I could pull around my shoulders when the world felt too heavy.

She had stitched her story not in journals or photos, but in fabric—each goodbye a shade of who she was, a color I’d never seen in anyone else.

And now, whenever I look at that quilt, I remember that her favorite color wasn’t red, or blue, or gold.

It was goodbye.

Because in every goodbye, she found a new beginning.

And somehow, in the scraps she left behind, I found mine too.