dark blue, green, purple

It’s been happening again, this abrupt undoing of the reality and my sudden lack of understanding of my place in it. Again? I’m not sure if it’s happened before actually but it’s not unfamiliar to feel so distant from my feet in the ground. After last October, I thought I was prepared for all the loss in the world but no, they really never prepare you to lose friends. Friends who leave, friends who are alive still but never seen again, never hugged again, never for you to love again. No, that’s not true, is it? We can love despite distance — or rather, we can’t not love, despite distance. 

I never prepared for the breathlessness in my lungs and the escaping of my tears and the way I swung arms away from myself, clutched tightly in my hand the book that I inscribed my many names onto and now, everyone asks me to not cry. But the colours appear in front me, the colours that became ours and the colours that we became. I realize our story can be told in three: dark blue, green, purple. Our tears were never plain, they mixed with the remains of water-paint on our cheeks and our nails never grew without the painting of these colours on them. 

And then on our last day, it rained. I hated it too much for someone who frowns at the sight of cowardly drizzling. I craved the dystopian slashing of leaves and the cruel growl of the sky-belly, but that day, it pulled me away from us. I traveled away and there was just a shell of me left to care and crave. We spent our last evening playing cards with a half-stranger, and playing mafia with more half-strangers. But there was bannoffe pie and the cooler in the common room was working and the polaroids we took all turned out perfectly. The shell of me was lesser so; the rain had stopped. 

We explored the city together, devoting so much of our time to the coolness of the crystals and whether we dared get something that did not sit well with our suns, our moons, or something. And the colours of our wrists were all green and purple and pink. So perhaps, we’re more than three colours but the strands of my hair seem to wisp out in disagreement. The copy of Circe, complete with the letter for me tucked in, is dark blue and the aventurine bracelet here is green. 

It’s terribly hard to walk and cry at the same time, especially when you have to get back to your room, fill your water bottle, and cook dinner all over again. But we do it, the three of us, the moon shamefully hidden behind the dark blue clouds and for some reason, we start remembering, instead of forgetting. It makes us miserable, I say. But they convince me, I would be more miserable trying to push away the embrace and the warmth of what was. And crying is not all cold and misery, it is communal, it is real, and it is warm. 

Emptiness is not curable and anything we do to replace it will stay like a wrong fit inside us. It won’t go away and it will come back as if for the first time over and over and over. We have pre-emptive emptiness and emptiness before the emptiness but it’s all the same. This beautiful place to be, this hell-hole. This escape, this prison. Our love, our love. We will always have it and we will always hold it, right here in our palms, in the blue, black, green, red, purple, golden of it all.