Underneath my clothes, I’ve hidden my worn earphones. In a pocket in a dress that has a thousand sides. When I walk from my apartment, having locked the door, having checked the lock, having listened to the other apartment doors for signs of life and I stride out of what seems like a Soviet remainder memory of a building...my dress changes colour.
In those times, when it does insistently rain, I might take up any shade of blue. Blue is such a beautiful colour. To me, it has never signified sadness. Or rather, sadness is integrated already. I’m a strange critter.
Though I am never in grey.
Some say I should wear green. I do have a green dress, but it’s very light and keeps falling off my shoulders because, unfortunately, I have the figure of an elfin. There is shape to me, but I always come about as taller than I am, and very long, somehow strained. Still, I also pour into people’s vision as slender and ethereal. I know this. It’s because I really am that way.
On days when anger tears holes in my memory, I wear the red. And I don’t care what it is as long as it signals bloody red. Neither does it remind me of doctors’ appointments and endless blood taking all over again, to always be sure of what’s really wrong with me. As another facet of whatever I am, violence comes to me like a second nature. I’d coat in destruction, though I control it. Without control, I am but nothing.
This is a lesson I will not share with you.
Underneath my clothes, I am all a hue of pink. I know people accuse me of being as pale as first winter snow, white and crystalline. But my inner workings, the slight light of all my little hairs all whisking in the wind while naked, that’s pink. Like the longing for hands to hold me at night and all my colours creep back into the cracks to be safe. Like feeling the whisper of a name given to me, burnt into my fingerprints. It is the knowledge of who that might be, who will come for me when all I can do is call with my eyes. And in the moment of realization, I turn to a candle of warm yellow.
That is a colour I do not wear to the outer world.
Underneath my clothes; there’s a story for you.