Addie Woltil, Ella Peirce

Evelyn’s favorite color is red, and after a lifetime of disaccord with the shade, I’ve found myself quite fond of it.

There’s no place like home; there’s no place like home; there’s no place like home.

You click your red—specifically ruby, for storytelling’s sake—Converse together, and the dreamscape of vibrant colors that has surrounded me for all of time slowly swirls into the drain, an iridescent coat laminating the memories we made whilst floating through paintings of scenic expressionism.

Waving goodbye to the coruscating, gleaming haze, we are fleetingly confined in a kaleidoscope of bittersweet blush; crimson fades to cerise, and cerise to a pale carnation, the colors imperfectly bleeding into the perfectly bleached fabric of time.

And I exhale, bottling my breath as though it’s my last, as we intrude on the unknown.

At least we have each other.

And so it began, the prompt manner of perfection demanded from us in a precipitated moment, originally intended to end as soon as it started, but it lured us into a labyrinth of barbed wire, concealed by the cloak of prospective poetry. 

We could’ve sworn we’d seen red lilies coaxing us into the core, effecting our acquiescent footsteps; retrospect requires me to deliberate the source of the scarlet hue.

In my youth, which I’ve struggled to recapture in an honest and candid fashion—each film reel has a fraudulent filter, shifting in the light, varied each time I reminisce, rescinding the horrors as if erasing the irremovable dark specks on the pictures—I was never enamored with red.

Red was too bold for the timorous nimbleness I constantly tried to convey.

Red was too angry for the fragile, false façade of flippant levity I attempted to showcase.

Red was too demanding for the pretense of delicacy I begged for everybody to believe.

Life had been decorated by a burning, bold, angry, demanding desire to be seen as anything but.

And so, everything was grayscale and monochrome; my colorful intrepidity—or so I liked to think—remained in a vault, tinctures of tints spilling out from the edges.

Because inside that vault, we were still floating through gold-framed paintings and capturing the nature of the never-setting midnight sun.

Because inside that vault, the kaleidoscope still entraps us, and we are still eternally entranced.

Because inside that vault, our twin flame won’t extinguish, and our abiding souls won’t fade, prevailing vibrant in the dust.

Because in this dull yet extraordinary world, surrounding us in gray formality and tedious, monotone propriety, I look to the brown floor and see a pair of ruby-red Converse, and I decide that our wonderland will live on—in shades of acute peculiarity and lovely devotion.