The Yellow Color

This was you:
Painting the L-shaped foyer
in our tiny Cape Cod home,
as your forehead hit ceiling slopes,
and brushstrokes bled
with the yellow color
I’d picked out at the store.

This was you:
seen by all as 
impossibly good
So loyal and so admirable–
to stay with a woman so sick.
Our nearly decade-aged portraits speckled
with floral flecks of yellow-
Were the tiny summer blooms
a clue- or rather, omen–
for those with eyes to see?

This was you:
Trapped in your own sickness:
bred of a religion forged to warp your mind
into a tool to frighten me,
while still
baking, for me, 
tiny perfect macarons
tinted with
the yellow color.

This was you:
Incapable
of fighting for me or us or anything.
While I signed papers,
and you locked doors,
Sending emails back and forth to divide
meaningless trinkets.
And miles away, I screamed into a pillow,
buried under blankets in my childhood home.
These walls were once a shade of yellow, too–
just a bit bolder, at my teenage request.

This is you:
Raising your glass at a party,
or so I was told,
and laughing with my friends,
toasting the end of alimony–
its taste, bitter and bilious in my mouth,
I was just as eager to spit it out, 
wipe it away.

Long-unmoving and unmoved,
thin film dissolves above
what spreads within, between, beneath.
And in the dark, your fingers softly crush
what they could not possess. This 
has always been you:
Your beer, your heart
are both –
The yellow color.

Kaitlin A. Kerr-Heidenreich is a nurse/nurse educator, actress, model, and writer. She holds degrees in both English Literature and Nursing. Much of her work grows out of the reality of living with a rare chronic pain disorder and finding true meaning in art, beauty, and connection with others. Some of her recent work can be found in Pif magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Haunted Waters Press’ online showcase: SPLASH!, Sons and Daughters magazine, and the Voices from the Attic anthology.