Colors – Savannah Cooper

CW: depression

The thing about grief
is it’s more than gray.
More than raindrops
sliding down the glass
of the bedroom window,
more than the white
noise whir of the fan
as it oscillates.

There are dreams where he walks by me
down a florescent-lit corridor, moments
where he calls my name in greeting,
in passing. There’s the feeling of her fingers
curled around mine, so real I can almost
believe I really felt it and didn’t just imagine
the way her soft skin might feel.

Loss is more than
lying on the sofa
on a Saturday afternoon,
staring at a carpet
that needs to be vacuumed,
studying the dust gathered
around the television.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s that too. But also—
the red flush of anger, the blue of forgetting,
the lavender of faded faith. It’s all the jokes
no one else understands, the movie lines
that are part of a lexicon I hold pressed
to my chest like a child gripping a book
in the library. Sometimes the missing burns
white and blinding, sun on snow.
And sometimes it’s dark, no streetlights,
just the quiet murmur of the highway
in the distance and a dog barking
somewhere, woken, perhaps, by another
unquiet exit.

Savannah Cooper (she/her) resides in Maryland with her partner and dogs. Her work has previously appeared in Ligeia Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, and Levee Magazine, among many other publications.