I like to pretend, sometimes, that our names and our stories and all our expressions come in color. Once upon a time, for example, would be forest green, jade green, the green of life and love.

Your name would be mocha or maybe dark caramel, flecked with fragments of whipped cream. It's a good, earthy color, like the mud-lusciousness of e. e. cummings, the fall of cumulus clouds when no one is looking. And my name would be tangerine, sour, an acquired taste that you have to roll around on your tongue before it sounds right.

Brown and orange don’t mix, you know.

(I know.)

That jacket you left on my couch isn’t brown at all, though. It’s black, classic polyester, but it smells ultramarine. It’s an old jacket, because the sleeves are getting worn, and it speaks so inexplicably of you that it becomes a drug, fabric that I must press to my face or my cranium will crash. It smells of grass stains and pumpkin spice coffee and maybe a hint of sweet chlorine. Beneath the scent of fresh ocean swim, there are hints of something floral. I can’t quite place it. Honeysuckle, maybe?

I’m afraid of washing it, so I strung it up on my clothesline, solitary, and now it dangles on my balcony. Every time I step outside, I can taste the flakes of skin and hair fermenting in the wrinkles (brown, like chocolate and cappuccinos). It sounds disgusting, as all truths of life do, but then again, you willingly licked whipped cream off the toes of that ex of yours for her birthday, licked and sucked and nipped because that’s the extent of your sex life right there.

I can’t go barefoot anymore because every time I do so, I think about her toes and wonder how they taste. Did she wash them? Were they shriveled, bony, or pink and fat like the digits of a child? Were they salty? Sweet? Did you like it?

Did you love her?

(“Mi amor,” you’d whisper into her hair, your eyes closed so you couldn’t see her glance flicker away to pavement-cracks-and-broken-backs, to the undulating biceps of men not imprisoned between two cultures. “Mi amor, there is only you.”)

There’s nothing to do these days but sit at my easel and think and think and wiggle my toes (inside mismatched socks) and wonder. I wonder what your toes, of all people, look like and what the rest of you look like. Then, I pick up the piece of charcoal and touch the tip to the pebbled paper, trying to imagine the angle of your nose and whether the left side of your lips smiles more than the right. I try sketching feet, but for some reason, it always comes out wrong. I take my pig-haired brush, wet the dried, cracked watercolor swirls on my palette, and attempt to correct the proportions, but I always end up washing the entire thing burnt umber. Sometimes, I mix a bit of cadmium red into the ochre and try to paint something simple with that improvised orange. But I should know by now that never works.

I’m not sure why I have artist’s block, if such a thing exists. Maybe I can’t draw you, or paint you, because you’d always hate my work. You despised watercolors, I remember. They tasted too much of sadness and salinity. The blurred edges and the merging of hues were always too melancholy for your taste. Watercolor was art through moistened eyes, the paper weeping in its distress.

(Besides, the way you said it just doesn’t roll around right on my tongue. Acuarela. Acuarela. Sorrow in too many syllables.)

You always said you had enough on your shoulders. You didn’t need the anguish of a painting as well. “And neither do you, querida,” you said to me once. I was pressed against a plaster wall, terrified, but that didn’t matter to you when you pushed me up straight and pressed your thumb to my lips. Our eyes locked, froze, stumbled, fell, and I breathed in the smell of your brown, brown skin. Marrón, isn’t it, in your soft-tongued Spanish?

You may now kiss the bride, I thought through quivering eyelashes.

But you smiled instead, and told me to stop chewing my lips so much they bleed, and bleed, and always bleed. I can’t break out of the habit, you know, not when you left, me still leaning upon that wall. I fought for air for a few minutes, oh-so-confused. “¿Por qué?” I would’ve ventured, but my lungs had collapsed.

And the next morning, I knew I had lost you forever.

“What’s in Spain that isn’t here?” I demanded.

“Querida, calm down,” you chuckled. “I will come back to you, I promise. I just want to see the world a bit, taste my heritage. I will return before you know it.”

No, that’s not it. The truth is, I wasn’t strong enough to keep you and tie you down. I wasn’t strong enough for you, important enough, brown enough for you.

I wiggle my toes and wonder dryly if they just weren’t to your taste.

(But why?)

Today, I sit alone, on a bench opposite the statue of some obscure hero on a horse. The day is beautiful and the park is only sparsely populated; yet I feel nothing but emptiness staining my teeth. I begin scrawling answers to the Renaissance worksheet in my lap, but above the rim of my glasses, I watch the city pass me by.

I silently predict the color of each person. He is turquoise; do you see that lilt in his step? And that girl accompanying him must be a dark magenta—an excellent match. They must be tourists, for she has out a cell phone camera and he poses ridiculously beside the statue.

Maybe, somewhere in Madrid or Toledo or Santiago, you’re posing on a statue, too. Except, the girl taking your picture is pink, a delicate baby’s shade, mother-of-pearl and strawberry pink. Rosa. A perfect complement to your chestnut smile. Tu amor.

My teeth tear cracked skin from my bottom lip, so viciously that I lick, and find metallic droplets in my mouth. It tastes so unbelievably not brown that I suck on the wound for a long moment in ecstasy.

“I was your querida once,” I say aloud, and press a watercolor thumb to my lip.

(And the curtain closes in red.)

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