Everything is Red
Casual exploration into my personal ties to the color red.
I want to write about red, not because it’s my favorite color, nothing is, but because I often find myself catatonic and slouched on the floor because I am filled with so much red.
I never know why I’m livid, but I remember one time I was in Paris at a Rothko exhibition when I saw the piece “Aeolian Harp/ No. 7.” It had such emotive, impetuous red brushstrokes that I began to weep because I thought for the first time someone else may have understood what it meant to feel so red all the time.
I think girls particularly are drawn to the color red.
Red reminds me of my mother.
Babies are supposed to be most comforted by the color red because it reminds them of being inside their mother’s bellies.
As girls turn older and into teenagers they find a hatred for themselves and in that, their mothers. Because as much as we hate to admit it, mothers and daughters are always too similar to withstand. I feel red when I am next to my mother.
Now that I am an adult I still consume the theory of red, not because I have much self-hatred, but because my mother never taught me how to be sad, so whenever I find things unpleasant it comes out in irrational anger. I haven’t cried in many years but I have let out a blood-curdling scream or held a turquoise-handled switchblade in my palm and wondered how it would feel to hurt someone with it many times.
I think my friends back home also experience the permanence of red.
My friends back home brand each other with cigarettes in a web of possession and envy and fear of moving on.
They think love is slinging coke into each other’s noses every other week instead of the bi-weekly.
And who am I to judge? I wouldn’t stop either even after I have finally reached the red in my nose from all the snorting.
They will never change in the catastrophe of obsession. They all fuck one another and hate and lie and all I see is red. I love them very much.
This time I don’t see red because I am angry but because I long so very much for them. For them to show me what lies underneath the mess of the fucking and the burning. They are good, broken people deep down.
I never have understood the initiative of stopping once the red comes.
I’ve always struggled very much with insomnia. What most people don’t know about insomnia unless they’ve lived through it, is instead of living in the present, you live in your dreams. Sometimes this is purposeful, sometimes not.
Insomnia, the severe type, drives most people to insanity. It certainly did to me. After a while, you get lost in the question of whether you are still in your dreams or if you’re finally awake. And if you are awake, a progressive darkness will soon escalate through the blinds of your almost fully obstructed bedroom window, leaving you horrified because you’d do anything to avoid lying back in your bed and trying to sleep.
The only difference I noticed between these lives is that I could not see the color red in my dreams.
I lived in a very grey home, with limited color, not even just of red, but drained even of light. Still, red was my salvation and I was desperate for repentance. Most of the time, I used my own body as a witness.
Soon, my body’s only purpose was to draw out proof that I were alive.
If not for the red– what is the role of a body?
In elementary school, I went to a catholic school that was meant to give me a cheaper, higher education. Instead, they taught me that climate change didn’t exist and that blood was blue.
How repulsive, to care so much that I have control of my own body, they lied even of my blood to take away my power.
I still do think about this oppression and how they tried to hide away the red in my veins. So I try to have pride in the abundance of red in my body. But sometimes I become weak and the red takes over.
You may think this is good. It is not.
I sometimes wonder if my excess of red pushed out everything else meant to reside in my body. Do I have anything but red?
Do I hold the will to care that six years ago red was my salvation and now it is my curse? My curse to care too much in an unsatisfactory matter and my curse to always end up back to where I started: finding a temporary answer in the red.