wild mulberry.

I'm eating strawberries like candy and my mornings consist of drinking the rain up in swallows of sky and sometimes think I have stars in my lungs, flowers growing in the spaces between my fingers and all this to say, do you miss me? Everything I touch is stained pink and smells like raspberries in the summer, and everything I breathe tastes like walking into Home Depot, with the wood growing old and damp and musty in shavings swept in scattered piles on the floor. I used to walk into the store and flip through the catalogues of color like each shade was a hue I could name, and I wanted to buy the paint swatches for not only the colors, but the name. I dreamt of taping them to my walls and waking up to a kaleidoscope of onomatopoeias, colors shifting slowly from deepest of blues to the softest of peaches, made up of words like winter surf, manhattan mist, wild mulberry. On the right side of my bed, I would plaster a whole sheet of yellows for days when the rain was my only rhythm, and next to the window I'd tape a sample called pollen grain, and I swear I'd be able to taste the sticky dust of it like I had blossoms scattered on the floor. Do you know that there's a color sample called Star Dust and it's the softest yellow, like an Easter egg dipped too briefly to be more than an echo? I imagine walking hand in hand to show you my walls and when you opened your eyes, you would laugh.

You are the color of Irish Mist and you smell like dried salt from the sea and I painted a picture in shades of grey and green like the cold coast, just for you, and everyone who sees it asks why the sea is butter yellow, not blue. I tell them that there are different colors for missing people and lately, everything is shot through with gold and it seeps and trickles into all that I do and what I want to say is,

I still hate the rain (and I love you).

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(fiction)