♡ it stayed beautiful, even as the hue turned grey ♡

pink often gets mistaken for certain shades of red,
but she hates it, because to her -- red is ruin.
pink is warmth left behind when you accidentally
touch hands with someone in a small, local cafe --
a shade that romanticizes droplets of rain in july.

pink, as stubborn as she is, teaches us real love like
how to memorize your partner's voice pattern or
how to hold onto small moments with them that
don't ever look like much, but mean everything.
pink makes that 'everything' possible.

she also makes everything feel closer, with her
seafoam green eyes and full lips. i kind of think
the world created the pink just to lean closer to her.
i mean, who wouldn't? too many people let her in,
especially when they first meet her.

pink dreamed of living in an all-white house
a few miles from the city, where mornings would
come soft and slow through linen curtains.
"don't forget the porch" she'd say, "i always
wanted a porch, so i could watch my children
dance in the rain i once melted in."

pink has always believed in things continuing
even after they should've ended.

all of the other colors
love lavender. she's
easy to confide in, and
her voice serenades all
those who meet her.
they'd tell you that
she listens more than the
others. maybe that's why
they keep returning--
spilling out more to her
than they meant to.

crimson even softens--
lowers her voice, because
lavender is the only one who
doesn't look at her like she's ruin.
pink lingers around, too,
rest's her head in lavender's lap,
and talks about love in syllables of
rose petals. lavender just
hums softly
because she already knows.

i always wonder what
lavender does with all of it--
the confessions, the pieces of
everyone else, that she now has
to carry. she does it like pressed
flowers between two book pages.

lavender never feels heavy to
anyone other than herself.
when the colors return, she
smiles-- who else will carry
the burdens that they couldn't?

vermilion is a damaged girl.
her hair is a deep, burnt red like heartstrings
and leans towards the chemical side-- she'd
been ground, mixed, and sealed into a jar early on.

her mouth is always too vivid,
as if she'd bitten into Eve's apple,
and she'd chosen not to wipe the
toxins away. ice blue and crimson
hover near her, trying to decide if
she belongs to them or if
she'd already made them hers.

you never know with vermilion.

it's hard to say, especially when
you'd already been dragged across
lips and subtly imprinted into skin.
vermilion doesn't get along with pink, no.
as pink believes in soft things, and fears
vermilion might transform something good
into something worth fearing.

as much as the colors try, vermilion
always finds a way to seep into their hues.
by the time they notice, she'd already become
a part of them.

she will leave, eventually.
like she always does.
it leaves me awestruck how someone
as beautiful as she was created to be
so harmless.

sepia is stained, a girl who was
steeped too long in lemongrass tea, chipped
cup barely holding as the steam rose into
blacklit air conditioning units. there is a tale that she once
held a whole room together; kept the lamplight on
hours into the evening, when everything looked warmer.

silver, sepia's old lover, wrote her carefully every month,
even though his letters cut into the page too deep and
sepia remembered every single word but chose to ponder.
he would sometimes leave the letters unfinished, hoping
that sepia could decipher the ink. time had never been that kind
to her, and she could smell it in the expired resin that
dragged and followed every time she followed silver into a room.

his last letter to her came folded wrong -- pages creased where they
shouldn't have been. and sepia cried, oh-- she cried.
someone had opened it, got to it before she could reach it, just like
everything else. she read it anyway. she always reads what's left behind.
but the sentences didn't hold, they slipped between empty promises and
lost goodbyes, the meaning had to be found somewhere else.

after that, sepia stopped expecting perfect endings,
she now sees things as they are. she sits in drawers, in
archived, dusty albums, rereading each letter, hoping to
find some clarity. to this day, the other colors say her hue is
fading.

i still haven't seen anything more
beautiful than sepia's tarnished shade.