The Color of Blood

by Mona Kabbani

I wish I could tell her all the ways her mere existence destroys and rebuilds every cell of my being. The foundation I’ve erected my life upon. How she sets my soul on fire.

Before her? What a funny frame of thought. Before her—I don’t believe anything could exist before her. There is just her, the start of her, and the silly, trivial things that occurred in another life. Another timeline wholly separate from now.

the human language fails where she begins.

I hope I am not forgotten. I hope my art bleeds through these tarps and stains my floors. I hope Zahra’s color becomes a permanent installation. I hope I bleed into her and she into me. I hope we can combine to create something cataclysmic.

I’m falling out of reality. I’ve slipped and I’m falling and falling, and I’ll break my body against the earth and I’ll wonder . . . my god . . . how could I have ever thought myself to have any worth, my life any meaning, when the celestial gods open their mouths and don’t even notice they’ve accidentally inhaled me too?

I have died every day since without you.

I would recognize you by your laugh, your smell, the way you breathe, and even if I’d lost all sense of sight I’d know you by the rhythm your footsteps make to accompany the music your existence creates in my head. I know you and I have loved you not by the absence of your flaws but by the presence of your darkness. How you dig your nails into your palms to break your skin when you’re worried or stressed, how you can only feel joy in the forced moments of blissful pain. I know you like paint knows a canvas, like the waves know the shore. I know you like my wounds know heat and the sun knows the sky, and I especially know you by your color—”