i used to pass through hours unseeing;
trees bent only as trees, sidewalks lifeless,
stars scattered with no intent,
a half-printed message across the sky, abandoned,
my eyes granting only a glance, incurious.

days blurred into greys and whites,
faces smudged, no more than filler;
moonlight indifferent from a lamp post,
a fluorescent reminder that another day waited,
stripped of purpose.

yet hesitation flourished as the trees hummed,
when laughter of friends cracked an ethereal silence
of my ordinary hours, a longing raw as first hunger
to live in a life i had not yet touched.

they said my laughter carried again,
my smile bent toward radiance,
each word charging me with colors
from a brand new world i hunted so desperately,
forever fearing the slip back into monotone.

your quiet enthusiasm moved like a brush
across the blank canvas of my soul;
each shade a balm for what had been forgotten:
the rush of yearning, the ache of living,
the pulse of a love not yet named.

your eager gestures to the sky taught me
stars were never for skimming,
nor for begging judgement between lines;
constellations turned to scripture,
rewriting my grim study of life.

alas, color has its burden —
brightness deepens the wound of absence,
silence becomes deafeningly loud,
and i find myself pleading for a moment
of safety in the dullness once despised.

i dread the day these tones withdraw to brittle ash,
when trees fall mute, enduring what i could not;
when your voice is swallowed whole by the din
of the world, my laughter returning hollow,
a sound without longing behind it.

so i cradle these idyllic colors and tones —
fragile, vivacious, edged with fracture,
each step careful, knowing these hues will soon fade
back to monochrome, even as their sharpness
cuts my fingers open, staining them a painfully vivid red.