The Pink Room

It’s raining here right now, and I just remembered my room in the old house. Everything was pink. It wasn’t a true pink, like cotton candy or crayolas. It was a pink tinged with gray, or khaki maybe. I sat at the pink desk when I wrote my first poem. I learned how to apply eyeliner in front of the mirror of that pink vanity. I was kissed for the first time in the 7th grade. That night, I lay awake for hours, beneath my pink comforter, on my slim twin bed with the pink headboard.

I shared a room with my younger sister until I was eleven years old. When my father built a new room in the garage, and started sleeping on the sofa in there, I inherited the room that was his office. At first, that heavy pink seemed like a good idea. However, with time, I came to hate the color for not being sophisticated, or cool, or much of anything at all. Not even pink, really. It magnified all the frustrations and shortcomings at the time—everything inadequate. The house seemed too small, and the street wasn’t long enough. It was all so constrictive…just nothing seemed to fit. Everything started to shrink, right when I was still in it, like a sweater in a cartoon.

When it rained, I used to lie there in that bed under the open window and pull the long drapes over the other side, making a romantic rosy canopy. The rain would come in gusts, and I could feel that I was very far away, the drapes flapping in the wind like flimsy, pink wings.