White

I have finally realized why I need white. Why on a whim, I painted my office white the other day. Why I just bought that expensive white shirt that I do not need. Why I can’t break away from a white bedspread, sheets, pillows, everything that surrounds my skin.

I am trying to erase my life. A blank page. A blank canvas, beckoning me to start it all over.

Colors remind me. Red is the blood from a surgeon’s knife that left me feeling like a partial woman. No one told me that I would feel that way. Yellow is the field of flowers that I happened upon in my youth when my skin was soft and dreams were my reality. Blue is the ocean that pulls me into its current over and over again only to frighten me away each time with its turbulent hidden world beneath its surface. Green, the color of a lover’s eyes. The one that left me wounded.

On and on they go. Lovely yet dangerous, they caress across my every memory until they begin to overlap. Streaks of orange slashing through the pinks, purples overtaking the reds, silver and golds sparkling until they feel brown. Over and over they swirl, one color upon another, until they cannot help but to darken into black. The color of a void. The color of dying. I cannot risk any more colors.

White rescues me. There is nothing in white. It saves me from myself.