Yellow is the color that they swaddle you in as a child, when your gender is uncertain, unplanned, regarded as a nonevent by progressively-minded parents. The mood of wearing dresses with bloomers, pants disguised by a gentler name, and running through the grass on chubby legs, dirt under the soft half-moons of your fingernails.

Pink is the color of valentines, of two-for-a-quarter hunks of bubblegum, the acrylic of your first retainer. You see it in the blush that rises to your cheeks when your cubby mate pulls your hair and runs away through peels of laughter. You scorn it in favor of blue, refusing well-meaning relatives’ offerings of sweaters, glitter-speckled leggings, anything that screams to the world that you are female.

Red is the color that leaks between your legs and brings your mother to you for ‘the talk.’ Different shades of it cover your lips in slashes, reapplied painstakingly in the third-floor bathroom where you go with Megan when you should be plotting points, tracing parabolas. It’s the color of the pen on the paper that announces your flaws, your mistakes, where a bubble filled halfway didn’t quite register with the machine.

Green is the color of your first car, dented, slightly rusty, one working speaker and sagging headliner. Green is independence, stacks of it, never as thick as you’d like, disappearing into books and computers and some great mythical being named ‘tuition.’

Black is the absence of color. You wear it like a shroud in the year after your mother dies, lungs filled with the absence of color, hacking, coughing, stuffed with straw, placed in a box lowered into a hole in the ground. You buy two pairs of pants that slowly turn gray from continual wash and wear them in weekly rotation.

Brown is the color of your roots growing out after you’ve dyed your hair the wrong shade of orange. Orange is the color of your hair, but only as long as it has to be. It’s the hue of your aura, according to the woman who reads it at a street fair on a bad second date, sensual, more peach than tangerine.

Violet is her name. A whisper of a person, you feel her growing inside you, created by two, but wanted by one. You paint the walls with it, knit impossibly tiny pairs of socks in watercolored hues. You wonder what your mother would have thought about your predicament, and how you’re making the best of it.

White is all you see in the delivery room. Panels of it hang from the ceiling, blinding you in the form of light. Trussed up for all the world to see, it is doctor coats, surgical gloves, perforated and slightly stained ceiling tiles.

Yellow is the color that they swaddle her in as a child.

 

Lisa DellaPorta holds a BS in English from West Chester University, and lives in Philadelphia, where she is working on a forthcoming memoir. Her work has previously been published in Transient Magazine.