Color Wheel

Red tastes like cinnamon and menthol, crinkling inside cough drops and candy

wrappers crammed in backpacks, slivers melting on fingers pink with fever. It’s bitten

and sucked and slurped from medicine cups ‘till it flushes faces with sickness, passion,

frenzy, or joy. It crumples like paper and broken hearts, and bleeds like pens screwed

loose, scribbling hurt feelings in diaries and blotting the pages. It’s viscous like honey

and dries fast, crystallized on cherry soda bottles and painted nails and swollen eyelids

that angry fists rubbed raw. It’s a skin irritant, an itch on the back of your neck beneath

the glare of the sun, a sting in the soles of runners’ feet. It smells like something burning

in the oven, and can feel like scalding metal, gripped too tightly by hungry hands. It

sounds like glossed lips smacking, inches from the bathroom mirror, pursed in thought.

Girls are agonizing over smudges and stains, trimming and lengthening the edges of their

mouths with lipstick and cosmetic wipes. Red sounds like heels clicking on ballroom

floors and fairytale dresses rustling in crowded rooms. It sounds like the skin of an apple

shredded between teeth, and the tinkling of Salvation Army bells along strip malls in the

winter.

This is a poem I write in my head in the hospital, when red is too close. I see it in

stripes around inpatients’ arms, in grease blooming through my napkin at dinner, splotchy

on my face when I look in the mirror. I feel it in my cheeks in the bathroom, my pants

pooling around my ankles, the lady in scrubs watching me through a transparent curtain.

Wishing she’d look anywhere else, I start fidgeting, tapping my foot against the white

tiles. She clears her throat.

There is red in the spine of the book I’m not really reading in the library of the

treatment center. I’m not really reading it because a scrub lady (one of many) is

scrutinizing me for signs of Prohibited Behavior. I don’t tap my fingers, I don’t drum my

feet, I don’t shift in my chair, even though my feet are buzzing from being locked in an

eternal criss-cross-applesauce.

The nutritionist has coiled red hair like copper wire. Every day she leads me into

her office, and I slice my fingers on the sharp edges of the food diary worksheets and

meal plans she piles into my hands. Protein, carb, vegetable, fruit. Pictures of shiny

apples and plump cherry tomatoes, flesh oozing through taut red skins. Red peppers and

red meat and bruise-colored eggplants dancing on diagrams, gardens growing in my

stomach.

Sitting at the table, cornered by two scrub ladies, oil runs down my arm and

leaves a red stain. The other ED patient, a fragile, bird-like girl, with wings poking

through the back of her shirt, blinks at me though red eyes. We both stare at our trays,

and then at each other, and then at the invisible oil stains that only we can see. The scrub

ladies are wearing lipstick.

Red is the color here, in mouths, on napkins, in my blushing cheeks when the

scrub lady sits on her stool outside the bathroom, politely averting her eyes.

Yellow sounds like flip-flops slapping against hot sidewalks. It feels light and

slippery like water splashed on sweaty faces, and the ruffling of cotton summer dresses

being pulled from racks. It smells like lemons, sunscreen, and beach linen strung up to

dry with wooden clothespins, salty sleeves and fabric damp from the ocean. It looks like

running limbs and sandals with the heels peeling off, grass stains on denim and sun-

bleached hair peppered with sand. It looks like freckles and caramel tans. It feels soft

between your fingers like dandelion fluff, there one second and gone the next. It shoots

into your mouth through fat plastic straws, sweet and acidic. It’s sponged clean from the

clouds at night, then cooks on horizon lines, an egg cracked in the sky.

“Time’s up,” says the scrub lady, extending her hand. I hand over my notebook,

and my black fountain pen. I’m not allowed to keep it in case I feel like poking holes in

my wrists in the middle of the night. Or in case another patient sneaks into my room and

steals it. I don’t know what anyone would do with a spiral notebook, but I give it up

anyway.

I’ve been writing about the pretty parts of yellow, reminding myself that it’s not

poison. It’s another assignment. Two years ago, when I was diagnosed, yellow became

one of my forbidden thoughts, along with the letter M, dirt, grease, and most edible

things. Yellow meant rotted teeth, butter stains, the rounded humps of the McDonald’s M

towering in the sky. Yellow was the stuff caked under my fingernails, the fried smell in

mall food courts, the tinge of my skin when I looked in the mirror. It was dimmed

sunlight, tinted gray behind the windows of the treatment center, bouncing off the glass.

“What did you write about?” the scrub lady asks me, tucking a wisp of hair

behind her ear. As if she can’t just read my notebook, which she’s holding tight against

her chest like it’s her very own.

“A color,” I say, standing on a square of sunlight reflecting on a floor tile. Yellow

feels cold under my feet.

The scrub lady purses her lips, as if deep in thought. Then she smiles, because

that’s what people do when they’re confused and don’t know what to say.

Blue is a headache and plucked strings of a guitar. It strums lazy rhythms in your

thoughts as your body wobbles, resurfacing from sleep, spaghetti limbs and Jell-O bones.

It’s a sore-cheek yawn and the cold air snapped across your legs when you rip off the

covers before the sun comes up. It tastes like iced coffee and peppermint gum, working

your jaw, easing your muscles awake. But it’s also a soporific, lavender scent oil and

counting sheep, hypnotism to the brain. It’s thick and scabby like a bruise, ringing deep

beneath your skin like a massage. It’s an exfoliant, scrubbing your skin tender and soft.

Blue is ice cubes, aromatherapy, a love song. It’s the tangle of veins inside frail arms, a

map of lifelong wishes, lifelong hurts.

On the car ride home, I have my notebook back, and I’m writing everything I

want to feel but don’t. Treatment wasn’t lavender scent oil or hypnotism to my brain. It

wasn’t exfoliating, it didn’t take the edge off, it didn’t scrub me clean of whatever I was

infected with. It wasn’t caffeine but it wasn’t a sleeping pill; instead I’m sitting in the

passenger seat of my mom’s red Corolla, half-awake and half-asleep. We’re cycling

through Taylor Swift albums, the ones I saved for and scribbled on my Christmas wish

lists when I was nine. They were the first pop albums I ever bought, exclusively mine. I

remember placing them proudly on the checkout counter and digging my favorite Eiffel

Tower wallet from my jean pockets, unwrinkling dollar bills as pink sequins rained on

the floor.

We listen to song after song, not talking much, windows rolled down. I stick my

arms out and dry, hot summer air rushes in. I can think of nothing but the sound of the

guitar and the gray-blue sky, hanging over miles and miles of cornfields. I write down my

last line, and this one feels the least like a cliche, the most real: blue is the color in your

head when you’re not thinking about anything.

I can’t remember the meal plans with the bleeding tomatoes, or the scrub lady’s

lipstick, or the nutritionist’s hair. I can’t see the oil smears on my fingertips; I’m not

looking at myself. Instead I’m distracted by the cornfields, swaying back and forth in the

wind like a thousand wisps of hair. Yellow on the bottom, blue on the top, our little red

car weaving a crooked path in between.