Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet light hovers over every inch of my life and I know -I know, violet is your least favorite color. But the purple hues soften every edge around us, and light up every nook and cranny simultaneously. We’re in this room, you and I. The floor is of wood and lilac water seeps through the planks slowly and it reminds me of that movie wedding scene (where water rises just enough to cover the betrothed’s feet) except this,

           is a burial of us.

Our clothes become diaphanous, slipping under the waves, and I don’t cry because when I look up from watching my toes through murky water, I’m no longer with you in the room.

your body is dissolving into the kind of static that comes after a TV stops caring, and because you’re no longer in the room, I can finally see how much I like violet. 

I step through the window into air that feels like an undecided god, not cold, not warm, a bruise of a season, purple-yellow, half-healed, half-fresh, the changeling bastard daughter of winter and summer and I feel free.

I hope you feel free too. 

I hope leaving my ultraviolet world gives you so much space that you can finally paint it that blue you like so much. I hope you fill that space with the notes of broken violins resonating inside warehouses, I hope once your life finally feels like yours, once you’ve finally learned how much you need to be selfish to become selfless, I hope you build tall windows on every wall and watch what light does to the mirror you covered in cobalt paint, I hope love pours in from every direction and coats your fingers like glue. Thick, sticky, and necessary.

I’ll be just outside, my back to your warehouse, my ultraviolet home crumbling down piece by piece, month by month, and I won’t be waiting for you. 

I’ll be sitting on green fluffy grass, eating grapes that taste like they were dipped in sugar water and forgotten in the sun, while bathing in heat that sticks to my skin like cellophane, 

I’ll be running down the field away from the rusted metal that paints your outside, hoping if I glimpse at it again someday that someone finally washed the walls.

As I run, as the wheat stems graze my hands, as I see the expanse of the world above my head, I can feel my molecules realigning themselves around a single chord, a chord you could name but I can’t, a chord you might have given me but I made my own, a miracle I didn’t know I prayed for, the strange shimmering stability of keeping each other alive by keeping each other apart, the memory of being understood until it hurts, the knowledge of me I got from you.

Your house is so far from me now that it’s just a black point on the horizon, swallowed by the blue sky. A purple tear rolls down my cheek and hits the ground and I wonder if all the tears I shed while running here will grow flowers, leaving you a path, and I watch the hope of your hand catching up to mine if you ever add a door to your walls enter my dreams and I hold it for a moment but it’s overcoming, it’s that one drop of color that takes over any shade, and I wash it with clear water before it can do so. 

My world is still yours to roam 

someday, 

maybe.

but my world is not yours to paint 

ever, 

again.