The Color of Blood

by Mona Kabbani

I am a blank canvas. A nothing person. A void that can be decorated and designed but never filled.

If I am a void, then she is utter totality.

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. This is the sole spectrum in which we alone can live. Everything else is monochromatic.

I don’t want to make people uncomfortable. I don’t want to scare them away. I want them to accept me. To love me. I want to lurk amongst them, truth hidden. I want to be seen as an artist, not a monster.

Your fear of failure is what will make you fail.

I want permanent proof. I want to feel it. I want our existence to have evidence. A love story painted in scars.

My body has developed the involuntary reaction to plead for her, and only now when she is not here to answer do I realize how grave her presence had become for my psyche. How necessary.

I need to ride the Ferris wheel. I need to reach the sun. I think one day maybe I’ll reach it. Or I’ll find her. Or I’ll break my body against the earth and never heal. One will come first. One will come, eventually. One must. But I feel her absence. Not just from my life, but from this world. The spectrums seem a little darker, stripped of that shifting, oil-slick hue.

It’s been over a month. A month and three days since Zahra. Every day I think I see her on the street, in a café, around the corner, only to find it’s some other dark-haired woman with a color not worth noting. For a month and three days, I have sent text message after text message to her cell phone, praying for a response, for the fiber-optic ether to speak back.

I have died every day since without you.

“I know you, Zahra,” I press. “I’d know you were the world consumed by eternal night and your soul a pocket of darkness. 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—”