28 Ways to Gray

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow I am 28

I am 28

And I live in the black and white

While making frantic and desperate efforts to blend

To balance the extremes and accept the mundanity of life

And find my place in the gray

She is 4

And dreams of rainbows and playgrounds and flying and love and safety

Her favorite color is red

But she presents blue

A deep, dark, engulfing blue that weighs heavy like molasses on her tender young heart

He paints her blue, extinguishing her fiery red spirit

As she cries sapphire tears

She is 6

And her name is June

Silent like the summer evenings on a front porch swing

Watching the long blades of emerald grass sway gently in the breeze

And the universe dancing through the sky in stunning hues of gold, rust, scarlet, indigo, mauve

An infinite looking glass

Reflecting her in - you and me - in her and all of us in the empty space between

She is 11

And dons drab solid khaki

As she organizes, mediates, guards, and pretends

But she is a transparent aquamarine

Courageous, soothing, expressive, protective

She suppresses her gifts and dulls her magnificence in selfless acts of sacrifice

As she drowns in a pool without surface

She is 17

And suffocates in unspeakable, blinding, all-encompassing white storms

Starving for release

From the red rage of flames licking her skin and incinerating her Soul

An inescapable burning forest of collapsed pines

She the kindling

He the match

She is 18

She is flirty, girly, peppy, carefree, in love – a rosy bundle of sunshine

She is a master of her craft

So skilled she’s even fooled herself

Manipulation and categorization so swift and impeccable

The roses never wilt and the sun never sets

A faux oasis built in the cobwebs with the imaginary sands of a shelved empty hourglass

She is 22

And she only knows dark black rooms with glaring white walls drenched in pools of her own crimson blood

She is black

And she is white

And she is drowning

In her own red

MIND

I am 28

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

And I am 4 and 6 and 11 and 17 and 18 and 22

And we are integrating

And we are seeking

The space where nothing and everything is black and nothing and everything is white

We are merging and we are pursuing the gray