Color

Grief?

𝕃𝔼𝕋𝕋𝔼ℝ 𝟙

---

𓂀

𝟙𝟚-𝟚𝟞-▅▅▅

There were rooms, I know that much.

There were windows, streets, mouths moving around me, hands reaching for mine, rain sliding down glass with all the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

There was light too, or something pretending to be light, but it never entered me.

It only touched the surface of things and left them exactly as they were.

Then you came, and the world changed its temperature.

I will not name what you were to me.

Every name feels smaller than the wound.

I used to think color belonged to the world.

Then I met you, and understood it could belong to a person.

You were my color.

I know how childish that sounds, but grief has made me honest in humiliating ways, and I no longer have the strength to make my ruin sound intelligent.

Before you, everything had edges.

After you, everything had light.

That was what frightened me.

Not loving you.

I could have survived that.

People survive loving someone every day by turning it into a habit, into hunger, into a photograph they stop looking at.

What I could not survive was being seen by you, because you looked at me as if there was still something inside me worth finding, and I had spent so long living in the dark that your faith felt almost cruel.

I wish you had never looked at me like that.

I wish I had never met you.

That is not true.

I do not know whether you were a person or the last mercy my mind invented, but I know the world changed its temperature when you looked at me.

And I know what I did after.

I had no choice.

I was afraid.

You have to understand.

I wanted that to be enough.

You were my color, and I still chose the dark because it asked less of me.

I do not know if I deserve to remember you in color, but I do.

I think that is why the dark never felt honest again.

---

𝕃𝔼𝕋𝕋𝔼ℝ 𝟚

---

𓂀𓂀

𝟘𝟞-𝟘𝟜-▅▅▅

I thought the first letter would empty me.

It did not.

I thought if I wrote the worst sentence down, if I let it sit there where I could see it, then maybe it would stop moving around inside me.

But it only became easier to find.

That is the problem with truth, I think. Once you know where it is, you start noticing everything you put in front of it.

I have been thinking about the dark.

Not the kind that fills a room when the lights go out. That kind is honest. It does not pretend to be anything except absence.

I mean the other kind.

The kind I lived in.

The kind I defended.

The kind I called peace because it never raised its voice.

I used to think it was something that happened to me. Something I inherited. Something was placed in my hands before I was old enough to know what hands were for.

I thought because I had been hurt by it, I could not also be responsible for it.

That was convenient.

There are parts of myself I have mistaken for wounds because it was easier than calling them choices.

You knew that, I think.

You never said it that way. You were kinder than the truth when you could afford to be. But there were moments when you looked at me, and I could feel the question sitting between us.

How long are you going to keep calling this survival?

I hated that question.

I hated it more because you never asked it out loud.

I told myself you did not understand. I told myself you saw too much light in things because you had not learned what the world could take from a person.

That was not true.

You saw the dark clearly.

You just refused to worship it with me.

That is what I could not forgive.

Because it is one thing to be loved by someone who accepts your ruins, it is another thing to be loved by someone who believes you do not have to keep living inside them.

You believed I could become someone else.

Not saved.

Not repaired.

Just less afraid.

Less cruel to myself.

Less willing to mistake numbness for strength.

And I made that belief your burden.

I see that now.

I did not only love you.

I used you.

I used the way you saw me as proof that I still existed. I called your warmth home before asking whether you had enough left for yourself.

And when being known by you started to ask me to stand upright in my own life, I called it pressure.

I called it fear.

I called it anything except what it was.

You were asking me to live.

And I resented you for it.

That is another truth.

Not the whole truth, but enough of one to make my hand slow down when I write it.

I knew enough.

I knew it would hurt.

And I loved you.

That was never the lie.

The lie was thinking love made me harmless.

I am trying to understand how someone can love another person and still become something they have to survive.

I called it love because I was too afraid to call it dependence.

I called it grief because guilt sounded too much like a door I would have to walk through.

I called it the dark because naming it after myself felt unbearable.

But I know better now.

Or I am beginning to.

I could only say it one way before.

You were my color, and I still chose the dark because it asked less of me.

That was true.

But it was not all of it.

The rest is uglier.

I made you my color.

I placed all the brightness I could not bear to claim inside you, and then blamed the world for going gray when you were gone.

That was not fair.

You were never supposed to be my proof that life could still be beautiful.

You were just supposed to be you.

You were someone I failed to protect from the dark I kept pretending was only mine.

---

𝕃𝔼𝕋𝕋𝔼ℝ 𝟛

---

𓂀𓂀𓂀

𝟙𝟙-𝟙𝟜-▅▅▅

I think I have been cruel to you in the way I remembered you.

Not on purpose.

That would have been easier to confess.

I mean, I made you too clean. Too bright. Too far from human hands. I took everything I could not bear to lose and placed it inside your shape, then called that love because grief made it sound kinder than possession.

I see that now.

Or I am trying to.

For a long time, I thought keeping the world gray meant you had mattered. I thought if nothing ever felt beautiful again, then at least my grief had stayed loyal. I thought joy would be a kind of betrayal, or worse, proof that I had not loved you as much as I said I did.

That was another lie.

A quieter one.

The kind that wears sadness well enough to be mistaken for devotion.

I do not think you would have wanted that from me.

I do not think you would have wanted to become the reason every good thing had to apologize before it reached me.

Still, it felt wrong at first.

The first time I noticed color again, I hated myself for it.

It was nothing important. Not a sunset. Not anything worth writing about. Just a piece of blue glass near the edge of a sidewalk, catching light in a way that made the whole street pause for half a second.

I looked at it and thought of you.

Then I looked away because I was afraid of what it meant.

I thought seeing beauty without you meant I was leaving you behind.

But I do not think that is true anymore.

Maybe the world did not go gray because you were gone.

Maybe it went gray because I could not forgive it for still being here.

There is a difference.

I have spent so much time making you into the only light I ever knew that I forgot you had shadows too. I forgot you were tired. I forgot you could be unfair. I forgot you had your own silences, your own little ways of disappearing while still standing in the room.

I forgot you weren’t made to save me.

You were a person.

That should have been enough.

I needed you in ways no one should be needed.

But the truth is, you also changed me.

Not because you fixed me.

You did not.

I still return to old darkness when I am tired.

But I do not believe it the same way anymore.

I thought if I let the world become beautiful again, then your absence would become ordinary.

It has not.

There are still days when I reach for you in ways I cannot explain. There are still moments when a room changes, and before I even understand why, something in me is looking for you.

I do not think that will ever leave completely.

Maybe it should not.

But I do not want to keep using pain as proof.

I do not want to keep making your memory live inside the worst thing that happened to me.

You were more than that.

You were more than my loss.

You were more than the color I could not keep.

So I am trying to remember you differently now.

Not as the light.

Not as the wound.

As someone who was here.

Someone who mattered.

Someone who touched the gray and showed me it was not the whole world.

I do not know if that is acceptance.

The word feels too calm for what this is.

I think it is closer to opening my hand.

Not because I want to let you go.

Because I am beginning to understand that holding on too tightly can become another way of taking.

You were my color.

That was the first truth.

I made you my color.

That was the harder one.

But maybe this is the truest thing I can say now:

You were not my color.

Not really.

You were the first person who made me believe I could see it.