Crimson.
Erin Jamieson

I paint the walls crimson and marigold yellow, leaving behind the faintest fingerprints. 

 

Autumn leaves, the changing of seasons, the inevitable elegance of transformation, dissolution of death. Vines crawl from carpeted ivory carpet to the ceiling, passing by your dusty bookshelves— filled mostly with books I hoped you’d enjoy. 

 

I add pops of green: a final remnant of summer, just above the bed. A bed that was always too small for both of us, neatly made now as it always was, my pillow already gone. 

 

The paint and the colors crawl into my head, my chest. I crack open a window, remembering when we first moved here, how we decorated the nursery. 
 

I don’t want it to be blue or pink or yellow, I’d argued. I didn’t want to place a stamp on that room. I wanted it to blossom organically. I wanted to hold on to our new life, without any preconceptions. 

 

We could leave it white, you suggested. I wanted you to say more, to have an opinion. To ask me why I was afraid to commit to a color. 

 

But you didn’t. You gave me a bland answer. As if you were desperate to simply appease me, qualm my inner fears. The fears you’d stayed up listening to, holding me but never offering a response. As if you hoped those fears would naturally disappear. 

 

I should have known. 

 

Our baby was the pop of warmth: the shocking crimson orange sunset on a cloudless evening. The splash of colour that bound us, that paled when I started cramping, when you insisted I was overreacting. 

 

After, we stripped the lilac paint. 

 

You painted it beige. Not even white. 

 

A colour like pasty, anemic porridge.

 

Lifeless, as both of us.

 

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I leave you this room. Not as retribution, for not weeping with me, for growing silent when I needed words. I leave it, knowing you will paint over it, knowing this house will be swallowed in various neutrals.

 

I leave it to say we did have something, for a breathtaking moment. We were all the colours of fall: crimson red with ephemeral passion, sunkissed aging yellow with hope, and walnut brown—the dying edges of a season we could not admit was coming to a quiet end.