if we were to assign emotions to colors -
passion would be where magenta and orange kiss the horizon at sunset,
joy would be the yellow of my socks every easter sunday that i can remember,
and melancholy would be just another shade of blue.

i told him,
i am not done with you yet.
three weeks post breakup,
we shouldn't feel as unfinished as we do.
like, in the ridiculously complicated narrative of he and i,
the author got up one day,
scribbled a quick ending,
and then set the novel on fire.

i read an article in an obscure magazine
about Shelley Jackson,
an artist
who got thousands of people
to tattoo a singular word
from a story onto themselves,
and then sent them back to their scattered existences.

maybe that is what this is,
another scattered story.
another vaporized narrative.

i can feel it in the air,
but not pull the phrases together.
it's like trying to hold onto smoke.
our story slips through my fingers and gets in my eyes.

if we were to assign emotions to colors -
my ribcage would look like a Jackson *******.
my head would be a paintball arena.

i am so full of indigos,
and mustards,
and crimsons,
that Van Gogh, himself, would dip into my palette
and claim to have never seen such beautiful sadness before.

i don't know if it hurts because it still matters,
or if it matters that it still hurts.

i feel the frenzied ache of creation in my gut.
i am not a painter,
but my mirror is showing me
the immaculate collection of brushstrokes
i have become.

a few weeks ago,
i was approached by an artist who offered to paint my bruises.
to collect my contusions with watercolors.

what a beautiful intention,
to immortalize the growing pains,
memorialize the bumps along the way,
to make something permanent
of these perpetual transitions.

if we were to assign emotions to colors -
my pride would be gold-plated and rusting from use, like my grandfather's watch,
courage would be the pure green of every bud that has dared to grow through concrete,
and love?
love would be prismatic,
like spilled oil on asphalt.

a rainbow one moment,
vanished the next.