All The Colours of You
You are teal. Not the bright kind they paint on walls to make offices feel “fun,” not the not-blue not-green kind that’s not supposed to remind you of hospitals and places with buckled jackets (places where children were never supposed to be but somehow keep ending up). But the deep kind that only happens in forests where the light forgets its name, where midnight breathes in questions no one knows how to ask and shadows carry secrets they never agreed to keep. The blue edge of teal that pools in shadows between old trees where roots tangle like old stories and new leaves still have the softness of first attempts.
There are paths in you that twist, double back, disappear into undergrowth tangled with briars that catch at your flesh like memory. Clearings that might be safe, might be traps. Places where wildflowers still dare to grow. Places where something that knows your name too well is watching, all jagged teeth and bitter claws and intimately known.
You are winter, too. Not the postcard kind though. The waiting kind that is quiet that comes after a clock strikes and no one runs even though they were supposed to. Midnight with a deadline built into its bones. That held-breath stretch of time where everything’s fine (technically) except your chest feels too tight and the future feels too close (you carry that hour inside you and somewhere behind your ribs, there’s always a little piece of twelve o’clock looking for a shoe that never did fit right)
You move the way small creatures cross open ground. Quick, careful, pretending not to exist. There’s a whole world that never hears you coming, never sees how much it costs you to step over a threshold, to open a door, to answer a call. They don’t hear the stampede inside your chest, the way your heartbeat stumbles like it’s trying to find the exit. From the outside you are “just tired.” From the inside you are sirens and headlights and the taste of something metal at the back of your throat (and I can see the soot staining your lips from the iron forges hard at work, though you think its origin is something else). Sometimes standing up is an epic. Sometimes sending a message is a battle. Sometimes breathing counts as a win.
And yet.
Somewhere under all that static, there is a small, stubborn thing that keeps whispering maybe. Maybe today. Maybe this time maybe it won’t hurt as much. Maybe you’ll get through this one without shaking. Hope in you isn’t some shiny slogan on a coffee mug; it’s more like a seed that refused to burn and where the edges around it don’t quite trust it. They’ve seen too many “maybes” turn into “of course not.” They build little fences of what-if and remember-when and this-always-happens (whuch are very good at protecting you badly). So you end up as this strange country where the border guards are terrified and the heartland still plants flowers anyway.
The world taught your body that danger is everywhere and then had the nerve to call you “sensitive.” As if your nerves didn’t have excellent reasons for catching fire every time you step outside, answer a stranger, think three steps ahead. There are days when overwhelm hits you like a car you never saw coming. Days when your mind just freezes mid-step, all your thoughts turning into a white-out of static. Rabbit caught in open space. Mouse caught in the lion’s gaze. Breath held so hard your chest aches for hours afterwards.
But courage looks different on you than the stories promised. No dramatic speeches, no swords in the air. Your bravery is a checkbox ticked even though your hands shook the whole time. A phone call made after half an hour of staring at the screen. A door opened when no one else seems to care what may lurk on the other side. You are the little mouse who stands its ground anyway, heart hammering, squeaking out a no in a world that keeps expecting you to be quiet. And on some days, without warning, you are the lioness herself. the one who bares her teeth on behalf of the small and the hurt (including the small, hurt thing inside you that was brute forced into silence). You don’t even notice it when it happens. You just think, oh, I did a thing. Everyone else sees the earthquake (or doesn’t, as the case may be).
There is a softness in you that refuses to die, even when you’re exhausted from surviving yourself. The world hurt you early, carved fear into your edges, and still you move like something soft and warm, whispering reassurance into other people’s storms (even when you’re drowning in your own). You are the kind of person who will stay awake to make sure someone else doesn’t forget a pill, even though sleep has been playing hide & seek with you for days. You will nag, gently. worry, endlessly. Set little reminders like candles in someone else’s dark, because you know what it is to feel alone in that space and you never want them to feel it if you can help it (I think maybe you’ve been the one needing care for so long that being able to offer it feels like breathing properly for the first time).
When you hurt, you fold in on yourself like wings trying to hide their own feathers. You are all curled limbs and silent shaking, an angel who fell a long time ago and is still embarrassed about the landing. You don’t like to make a scene of it. The world has taken enough from you without getting your suffering as a show. So you pull your knees up, wrap your arms around your own shins, and ride it out. Bruised, bloody, unseen. If anyone could see you then (trying so hard to not drip light everywhere) they would never again use the word “weak” within hearing distance of your name.
Inside, your mind feels like a house that remembers everything. Some doors stick when you try to open them. Some you avoid on purpose, because you know exactly what is waiting on the other side and you’ve already survived it once (there are rooms full of echoes you inherited, voices that sound too much like the past to ignore). And yet, even in that haunted place, there are signs of life: a mug left on a table, a blanket soft from use, the faint sound of laughter coming from a hallway that used to be nothing but footsteps and slammed doors. Somehow, against the odds, this haunted house has found itself full of people who love you. Who knock before they enter. Who sit on the floor with you when the walls start closing in.
You make jokes in the wreckage (silly ones, chaotic, sometimes nonsensical ones that arrive like startled birds and leave everyone blinking and laughing anyway). It's not that the things that happened to you are funny; you just know instinctively that if you don’t laugh at something, it will swallow you whole so you turn panic into punchlines when you can. You point at the absurdity of the world and shrug with a little smile, as if to say look at this nonsense. You talk about ghosts like they’re roommates. You talk about your own heart like it’s a badly written character in a show you’re strangely fond of.
You carry so many songs inside you. Some of them make you go quiet, hit too close to where the old bruises live. Some of them make you snort-laugh because the lyrics are ridiculous and true and just a little bit queer and you can see yourself dancing to them in a version of your life where your body feels like a place you’re allowed to be. You are a mixtape of lived experience, stitched together out of verses that were never written with you in mind but fit anyway. Sometimes a line will catch you off guard and you’ll feel it lodge somewhere between your throat and your spine and you’ll think, oh. It’s me (and for a moment, the haunted house, the forest, the winter, all of it, feels a fraction less lonely).
To some people, you are a secret. A thing kept offstage, a name not mentioned in certain rooms. To others, you are the long message at 2 a.m. that felt more like a confession than a conversation. You have always lived at the threshold between hidden and seen, and it’s never felt entirely safe on either side. You learned early that honesty could be dangerous, that existence could be controversial so you tell the truth in small, careful pieces. You hand over little shards of yourself (and watch to see if the person holding them bleeds or smiles).
If I could, I’d build a world around you out of things that don’t hurt. I’d strip the headlines of their barbed wire. I’d soften every law, every look, every careless joke that makes your chest tighten because you know exactly who they’re really talking about. I can’t. I am only one person with no say in how cruel the big picture chooses to be. But I can do this: stand in your doorway when you’re too scared to step outside it. Remind you that your fear is not a flaw, that your body and brain are not failures, that getting through a day is sometimes the bravest thing a person can do. And I can keep saying (as many times as you need) that you are not too much and never enough at the same time. You are just… you.
And that is exactly the right amount.
I wish I could hold up a mirror that shows you what I see. Not the version warped by old wounds and old voices, but the one that exists in the quiet spaces between your apologies. The one who does things while terrified (he one who would make an extraordinary example for any small person learning how to be kind in a world that keeps rewarding cruelty). The one who thinks she has to become “better” to deserve soft things, when the truth is that the softness was meant for her from the beginning.
If there is one thing I want sewn into the lining of your days, it is this: you are not a problem to solve. You are not a project for some future version of yourself to finally get right. You are already a whole story, messy and painful and beautiful and ongoing. You are a forest at the blue edge of teal, a winter that still believes in spring, a haunted house that learnt how to light its own windows. You are uneven heartbeat, deer-in-the-headlights panic, mouse-facing-lion courage, lioness roar, ridiculous meme at 3 a.m., soft reminder to drink water, quiet “did you take your meds,” and the kind of hope that keeps opening its eyes even when it would be easier to sleep.
You are (whether you believe it or not) the bravest thing.
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If you want to hear her the way i do, there's a playlist (because of course there is):
