I press my head onto the plastic lining of the rolled down window creating my own separate bubble within your world of small talk, it’s funny because over here I can sit back watching your words float lazily over to me, leaving streaks of hope as we drive home. And you’re talking in colors, you’re thinking about the brown of the bike races the day before, and the blues of the sky that washed us over in the rays of the orange heat that licked fearsomely upon the back of our clasped hands, clasped in a loose lock as we walked carelessly upon the tired beige of our worn out heels. And you’re driving in red despite the deep black of the concrete, it’s as though your words have been rolling around in the whole of your happiness: the red pool of it drenched in this love you emanate, and now these words—these words— bleed out of your mouth and float hopefully into forsaken clouds that keep growing above us. You know… I can’t decide how I feel about the rain anymore.

Now you’re talking to me about memories and happiness and red—about love—even though you don’t know that that is what we are talking about. But you see the red of your lips bleeds into the conversation, and your lips are stained this deep color because your heart seems to have spilled out this immense joy unto your whole body; from your over ticklish feet to your needy finger tips, and so your thoughts and your words and your actions are all red, and mine are all purple… And so I listen to you and add in my “yeah” ‘s and “hahah”s so that you know I hear you, but I close my eyes instead because I cannot close my ears and all of the red is hurting my head, and my head is getting warm sitting on the hot plastic of the window lining and it is all too much. I clench my eyes tight and bear witness to the beauty of observation: your words slowly melt into a numb buzz of conversation biting at my fingertips and the world swells past me in flashes of oranges and blacks as the sun bursts out from behind trees and houses and is perpetually thrown back into the darkness. Oh the world you find when looking through a thin layer of unfolded skin over your eyelids… oh the world you find when you realize maybe a life like THIS wasn’t what you really do want, deep down . I allow the orange to smother the thoughts that have been budding in the back of my mind… as if to pacify the ache of red with the indifference of simplicity.

I wish I could say I love you too and know that I mean it.
I open my eyes and the world is stained now too, but by this afterglow of orange from where the sun had peaked through in its brilliance, and I wonder if that is the way that my relationship has been with you… it’s like… I think that… Well I think a lot of things, like the world is beautiful, and the sun is brilliant, and colors are a mixture of perfection and earnest simplicity, but I still can’t think deep enough to admit this to myself. I let these words slide down that slick slope of my tongue, back down my throat as if to swallow the thought, but the ache pervades through the thin lens of right and wrong and I know… god, I know! I know that lying to you is just as bad as lying to me and all of your red, and happiness, and love just makes me feel awful because you have a tiny little problem… it’s not your words, because even though I drown them out sometimes as I float away into the world of my own thoughts, and allow them to hide away like the sun behind trees, I hear them, and it’s not your smile or your laugh or your personality, it’s something so much more elaborate, something I don’t understand.

But now the car jolts softly onto our street, and I lift my head from the lining of the window, and it peels off heavily from the warm sweat that has caked on in response to the summer sun just as we are pulling into our driveway. And I look around and everything is so wrong our driveway, our house, our lives… my lie. I just feel purple