Magenta

Seeing my reflection in the water makes me wish it’d be reflecting blue instead. Blue, or the red in your lips the last time I saw you. Red, or the yellow in the sunset when you turned your back and walked away.

All I have now is brown. Brown like the box in the corner of the room that is making me feel like I am suffocating. Brown like your caramel skin that I wish I was undressing rather than building these grey walls around me.

I am going through changes, phases, colors, faces. Sometimes I wonder if this brown box was found where it wasn’t supposed to be - right in the peak of our phase.

At 23 I remember thinking I knew what I wanted. Orange meant healing and green meant a new start.

At 24, you brought magenta and transformed my color scheme.

At 26 all I thought about was you in white.

Brown was something I needed to heal. Beige wasn’t a color that I wanted in my palette.

What courage do I have left? I find myself standing in front of this brown box wanting to set it free. I want to set myself free.

It is magnified in science that our cells don’t need to forgive in order to survive, though it brings a heavy presence into the heart. Being raised in a way that made me believe that in order to fit in, I had to love colors that were the opposite of me, never the same. See, opposites in my case are colors like blue or black – and you were magenta.

My beautiful magenta. There is nothing that I want more than to build a home with you. A home where brown boxes aren’t stored in the corner of rooms. A home where windows are opened for expression and love is the pillar of everything we do.

I know that before I am able to build anything, I first have to release the bricks weighing me down because of this brown box.

There are probably hundreds of handwritten letters stored in this box. Letters, notes, pictures, and memories that weigh on me all the time. Things that I am still not ready to forgive or let go of. He is no longer here but I still carry the words he used to describe who I was and who I was going to be.

The person that was supposed to protect my heart was the person that suffocated it.

As undeserving, unloving, and empty I felt growing up - I am slowly accepting that I am not him, I am me. I am sure if he could see me now, he would be proud of some of my qualities as I know I got them from him – at least that is what I tell myself.

Ancestry is a beautiful thing, though it can mean desolation for many. It can transform the entire essence of a personality into suffocating grey where no colors are allowed to shine through. It can shut down the spark in eyes that were once full of curiosity. The pureness of the heart literally being dragged through rock, solid, grey pavement.

I do find myself on a daily basis longing for the blue in the oceans around me to take away the brown that came into my life when I was young. My mom used to repeat how yellow should always be overflowing in my palette, that way it transforms the brown into gold.

Yellow as in the sunset the day you walked away, or as in the fire that still remains in my soul.