The Color Red
My name is Jamie, and I am the color red sitting in a room that is nothing but white.
This is the color I put on my lips in the morning, the color of the dress I wear as a second skin at night, the color of the sunrise creeping through the curtains of my room.
I wake up early the next day, the sun casting honey golden shadows on the periwinkle blue walls. The last chorus of a faded, whispery blues trickles through the wall, and I hear the needle on the record skip for a moment, a dull scratch in the song's surface. Moments later, the record winds to a halt and i hear my next-door neighbor flipping it over. my neighbor's name is Kelly, and she has been sober for six months, no wine crossing her shell-pink lipstick. Prior to that, she tried to kill herself by overdosing on her antidepressants, those jagged little red angels she got from her doctor. She came back from the brink of death claiming that something had touched her while she was unconscious. She now always carries a bible and has quit her old job as desk lady at a tattoo parlor to pursue her own art. Her eyes are the color of jade and would be very pretty if she didn't always have a look in them like she was about to cry.
The stoplight that made me late for work, the shade of crimson I began dying my hair in tenth grade, the blood that wells up in my skin when I cut it on an envelope by accident.
The office I work at is white walls and cubicles, men with their silver-lined ducktails and black business suits and blond women in blue pantsuits. The office is too white for the black and blue. It looks like the office is bruised. My dress is the only red, a violent red muscle vibrating against the stillness. I keep good standing there, no one can complain that my look is preventing me from working along with the rest of the office. I keep myself covered, no one can tell the boss to make me change. It may not be professional for a woman to come to work with her hair and suit flaming red, but it is for me. Hell, it's the least I can do.
The fire that I had a nightmare was destroying my home, the cardinals that nested not five feet away from my building, the cover of the bible my mother gave me on my first communion and the roses at her funeral.
I can handle whispering and stares. It's all in good time. they can see me now, but it's just a few more years until no one wants to look at me anymore. And even then I will proudly be red. Red like Christ's bleeding heart, like the first sweet bite of an apple, like holly berries at a bitter
Christmas. It is bright, beautiful, and sad, but also warm.
The volcano in a movie about Hawaii, the butterflies in the Brooklyn botanical garden in the summer, my life as an exile into the land of silence, me.
I am red, I am flames raging against a wall of white and empty, and I am the only one in my world who still thinks and feels beyond white and black and blue. And I am not afraid.
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