1 RAINBOW

I hated the color blue. Although, my sheets are blue, my walls are blue, my shoes are blue, and the little star stickers on my ceiling from 5 years old are blue. I hate the color blue. Blue is like an unsaid list of restrictions of who I could be. Blue is like common knowledge yet I had to memorize it. Blue would write on my calendar, in red taunting letters, "Soccer Practice". Blue is the iron cage that tightens every time my rainbow heart would try to burst. Blue is the idea that men should stick with sports and stay away from dress-ups because it's not normal. Blue is the normal that I could never understand. Blue is the rule that boys aren't allowed to wear pink even if pink chanted my name like a mantra.

Now, Pink, Pink was my paradise, but pink was also a Walmart parking lot at 3 am. Pink would leave my heart with little rainbow butterflies. But, Pink would also eat my heart out till' it was empty. Pink is the old and worn fairy costume I wore every time, my depression would visit me. Pink is the collection of MAC brushes I secretly stashed under my bed. Pink is the stolen Urban Decay Palette from my sister. Pink is the peculiar, people can't accept.

I was standing in the scarred, barren grounds of my hollow labyrinth. The agonizing wails of my anxiety and the endless whispers of my insomnia would color it. My feet stuck in the hardened mess of my sexuality. My chest filled with thousands of unsaid confessions to myself of who I truly was. The withered trees judging my torn, broken soul with a broken identity. I had two paths, easy enough I only had to force my weak heart and my clumsy brain to choose the new light I would take.

Pink or Blue?

Pink meant happy. Pink meant dress-ups and piles of makeup brushes no longer hidden. But pink also meant tears stains in my mother's cheeks. Pink meant disgust from father, pink meant never seeing them again because I chose to be happy. Blue would mean the never-ending feeling of falling from a hole in my chest. Blue would mean locking my cage and throwing the key away. Blue meant leaving me, and choosing normal. Because normal would make mother happy. Normal would make father proud. Normal would kill me.

With a blind heart and a lost mind my feet began to tread, the heavy chains of anxiety no longer anchoring me. The wails of insomnia no longer bother me. Breathing was no longer an obligation, Breathing is now my newly-found addiction. I chose to pick the lock of my iron cage. I chose to let my heart free. I chose to be happy with my story filled body and my multicolored sexuality. I finally chose to let rainbow represent me.

by MATM AFC