The Astonishing Color of After

Maybe if I could draw the emptiness, I could control it. But it was never dark enough. It was never the blackest black.

He would never cut me off. This I knew. This was all on me.

I watched his fingers tap-tap-tapping against the steering wheel as he searched for the right words.

a longing for the past, for a simpler time, when grass stains were among my biggest worries.

even if he could wrench that arrow free, the rest of me was so punctured and torn that nothing would ever be able to suture me back together.

My mother is free in the sky. She doesn’t have the burden of a human body, is not made up of a single dot of gray. My mother is a bird.

the air changed as though I’d disturbed the surface of a still pool.

If Axel were there with me, he probably would’ve squeezed my shoulder and asked, What color? And I would’ve had to explain that I was colorless, translucent. I was a jellyfish caught up in a tide, forced to go wherever the ocean willed. I was as unreal as my mother’s nonexistent note.

It’s easier to pretend the stain is acrylic paint. Pigment, emulsion. Water soluble until it dries. The one part that’s hard to pretend about: Spilled paint is only ever an accident. Spilled paint doesn’t involve a knife and a bottle of sleeping pills.

The one part that’s hard to pretend about: Spilled paint is only ever an accident.
Spilled paint doesn’t involve a knife and a bottle of sleeping pills.