The walls

In this house I am leaving, I painted nearly every wall. I painted them pumpkin and cement rose, twilight and re-leaf. I painted them helium and downpour and damask. Before I painted them, the walls were the color of butter, but a butter colored with annatto, not butter turned yellow by wild grass. They felt like sweating in winter. To me, at least—I’m sure the painter felt swathed in sunlight or some other frosting. Room by room, I curated my small world: paint is power, a rearranging of how the soul inhabits a moment.

In this house I am leaving, someone will arrive and paper me over. Or buy paint to seal me behind the world they want to make. The colors on the walls are a soundtrack. I move into each room and I am in a different song. Another scene is possible, only now it isn’t. In the place I am moving to, no loud music nor painting possible. I will live for a year in an off-white space, carpeted, unsuited to my vibrations. Maybe, though, I will be better able to hear myself in a place I haven’t bled through like a broken pen in a pocket.

A house is maybe how you keep your hands warm.

When something knocks, no matter where I am, I will need to open the blue door. I will need to be glass. Liquid and solid, challenging all that would pass through me, even the light, even as I let it.