Red days

In the calendar, they are holy. She wonders idly why they were given the colour of blood. Her inner eye conjures up light reflected sparingly through multicoloured glass, the smell of incense, a cool sort of dampness from massive stone walls, a deep, steady chanting. Though perhaps the red hearkens back further, to rituals of blood sacrifice. Giving something in order to receive. Sympathetic magic. This seems to her now—during her own red days—appropriate.

What would she sacrifice? The hardened shell of her tells her she already made her sacrifice, her choice. If not exactly punishment, this is consequence come home to roost. She sacrifices blood again and again, hoping in return for a quickening. A pulse. A fast new drumbeat to accompany her own. 

Now she wears black. A private mourning. On her screen eight people pop up in their little rectangles—all shades of black and grey, a white collar here and there, a glint of gold. Her boss’s lips are stained pomegranate red, a startling contrast with her pale skin and dark brown silky hair. For a moment she thinks there is a smear of blood in the corner of the woman’s mouth. Is she a vampire? A question draws her out of such macabre musings—what does she think of the design for the rebranding? If her colleagues notice that she’s flailing, improvising, covering, they do not let on.

Fresh pomegranate juice from a Turkish market stall. A cool, sweet burst of freshness under an unforgiving sun. The scent of spices, of grilled meats mingling with the sunscreen they have both diligently applied to each other. Taking care not to let the other burn. Back in the before times. Worry free.

She thinks of him then—her relief, already at work for hours in his office with the glass walls. Looking out over his kingdom. Are his loyal subjects looking back at him? Transparent. But to her he has become opaque. No longer does he linger in the morning, gently running his fingers through her hair. No longer does he make her coffee and touch his soft lips to hers, murmur some sweet nothing, his hand still drawn to hers as he moves towards the door as if he cannot quite bear to let her go.

The spring sun filters through the half drawn curtains, throwing gold across the room. Still, there is something cold about their kitchen. The massive marble breakfast bar cool under her fingers. All sleek lines and jagged edges. The tulips in a glass vase providing the only splash of colour. Crimson. 

Her coffee too gone cold—the delicate porcelain no longer releasing tendrils of steam—while she perches on the inflexible bar stool, waiting for the nausea to pass. 

Their bed this morning, cold as well. His back was shades of grey in the predawn hours as he quietly pulled a shirt over his head, obscuring the groove along his spine—one of her favourite parts of his body. She stretched out her hand, still fuzzy-headed from sleep, trying to reach him in the soft moment before the day begins, but if he noticed he didn’t let on. If he noticed the red in her eyes, the blush around her nose, the telltale signs, he didn’t let on. She knows, however, that he could not have failed to notice her sudden eruption in the middle of the night. The panic. Wiping blood off the sheet. The shower going. The howl of pain not nearly muted by, not nearly soothed by the water as she sat slumped under the metal square that was supposed to give an illusion of being outdoors. Trying then to imagine herself so. A tropical night. A sudden deluge. After which again life. God is in the rain. But is she?

Steadying herself, wet feet on the cool floor, she wipes at the mirror but her reflection remains blurred, unclear. The cleansing hasn’t quite taken. Still feeling dirty as she crawls back under the sheets, wanting to take comfort in each other like they used to. Wanting him to tell her it would be okay. But he doesn’t stir. 

His breathing is too regular, his eyelids give a telltale twitch. After 15 years, she knows when he pretends to sleep.

Now, still shivering from grief, from lack of sleep, from the feeling of trudging under water, she lights a fire. It catches quickly, whooshing into vermillion peaks. Wood crackling. Comfort. Heat. Passion. 

They had nothing but passion in the rose coloured days of before. The early, uncomplicated days when they were full of each other. Spontaneous lovemaking, fits of laughter, electricity at a mere touch, and that feeling of wanting to know him so deeply—all his darkest secrets and deepest thoughts but also what he liked to eat for breakfast and what he was like as a child and if he broke the spines of books when reading. Time stretching out endlessly before them. 

She had been greedy when she found him. For his touch, for his time, for his eyes on her—sparkling with amusement at a shared joke, eyebrows quirking up in a question, the softness in his gaze when he thought himself unobserved, burning intensely into her at a party in a way that let her know it was time to leave, for them to be alone. She had thought they had time enough. 

And now it seemed her love for him, her need for him—having transformed, was pushing him away. She thought they had been on the same page two years ago, when she had decided it was time—she was ready. Ready to share her love, ready for the metamorphosis. And yes in the back of her head the bell was tolling ominously, she knew on some level that time was running out. Two years of hoping. Two years of him slowly slipping away. Had she already seen some hesitation in those deep brown eyes back at the beginning, a furrow in his strong brow? Had his reassurances and comforts always had a hollow ring she could not hear from within the well of her own grief?

Red is the colour of danger. A stop sign, a warning light. Don’t walk. Perhaps it is time she heeds the warning. Lets this sacrificial blood flow free like a river, setting a new course. She tells herself it’s not a bad life. And it’s not. She tells herself it’s not a big loss. If she repeats it often enough, she hopes she will believe it. 

Her phone lights up with a message. “I’m sorry. I love you.” She realises with these few words that it is her pain he seeks to escape each morning. It is that which he cannot bear. Perhaps something can be salvaged from the pyre after all. The world is burning, the old burns with it, leaving the possibility of fresh growth.