The pink fluorescent lights of Mel’s drive-in diner burst and smear, too bright to look at directly, like someone rubbing neon into my eyes. Pink everywhere. On my cheeks, my teeth, the inside of my skull. It was meant to be glamorous. Hollywood.
The road tilts toward me. Or I tip toward it. Gravity has opinions now. The green glass bottle is still fused to my hand, glowing faintly, a cheap emerald, a prop that never learned its cue. Colors misbehave when you stop supervising them. Pink slides into green, green rots into grey, a sick, pulsing grey that coats everything, faces, promises, the future I was once supposed to have. A luminous one. I was clever once.
The pavement rushes up, grainy and close, breathing heat into my cheek. I taste dust, metal, something sour. My hip bones press against the road, sharp and wrong, like I’ve been folded badly. There used to be more of me than this. I think.
A car slides past, too fast, headlights washing me in white. Music leaks from the open window.
« You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it
And the clock waits so patiently on your song
You walk past a cafe but you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long
Oh, no, no, no, you’re a rock’n’roll suicide »
Bowie. The chorus lingers longer than the car, a hymn to wanting everything and calling it freedom. I laugh, or try to, but it comes out wrong. Fingers brush my throat, hesitate, then obey. It isn’t about sickness. It never was. It’s about subtraction. About becoming small enough to slip through the cracks where expectation can’t follow. Pink was the first color I loved. Cotton-candy pink, birthday pink, the pink of cheap plastic cups sweating lemonade in my hands. Pink meant beginning. It meant that something was about to happen. Green came later, schoolyard grass, chalkboards, the promise that if I learned enough words the world would open like a book written just for me. Blue was patience. Yellow was mercy. I wanted them all. I still do. That was always the problem.
Money has a color too. A dull, apologetic green. Neutrality that stains. Green passed from hand to hand, palm to palm, like a secular sacrament. I learned quickly that desire is easier to sell than thought. That bodies are simpler than minds. That being seen is not the same as being known.
I remember sitting on my childhood floor, crayons spilled everywhere, unable to pick one. The blue was too calm. The yellow too kind. The red too final. I pressed them together instead, hard, until wax clogged under my fingernails and the page tore. I liked the moment just before it ripped, the resistance, the tension, the sense that everything was happening.
The red of the car fuses with my skin, crimson sheets that bore no cover, the disgusting warmth of a sultry sweaty body forcing itself on my own. A stranger from the highway waited in the neon-lit motel room, and I let the trembling light on the walls and hollow weight in my chest claim me, believing for one impossible moment that this, this dark, this heat, this surrender, was still my road to Hollywood. An exquisite crimson gown should have adorned my figure instead of those cunning bedsheets.
If all colors were ever to agree, they would disappear into white. A union so complete it cancels itself out. God must be like that, total, undivided, impossible to inhabit. Everything and therefore nothing. He left early, or perhaps I did. Our Lord was always as brief as a prayer you forget the moment it ends.
I look up but the sky is empty. Hot tears run down my cheeks, dragging two black lines of mascara behind myself. I look up but the sky is empty. Empty. What came first, the egg, or the hen? What came first, pain or perfectionism? White was once the color of endless possibilities, it could mutate into any other color regardless of the shade, now it’s boredom and dullness itself. The flashlights bleach the street, flattening it, flattening me. They don’t illuminate; they erase. Whatever light I had leaks out on the open road. I greeted the devil with a faint nod. He called many faces his own, the teacher, the mother, the judge, but today he wore my own. Jet-black hair streaked with cobalt blue, like bruised sky cascading down his back. I once had a promising future. That was the only certainty I was raised on. Expectations burrowed into me, grew roots, twisted around my bones until I could barely move. Pressure. Blank, obscene whiteness, a void that watched me, hungry. Time runs like blood through a cracked hourglass, can’t you hear it? Tick, tock, tick, tock. Perfection, my sin, my soul. I sold them, every fragile piece, and now Old Nick has come to collect. I fell into his arms willingly, and even as he held me, I felt the thrill of surrender, the dark pulse of something inevitable taking me whole. Old Nick held me. Or perhaps I held myself. The distinction had been irrelevant for years, in classrooms, in apartments, in streets too bright and too empty. Pink smeared into green, green rotted into grey, grey drained into white. The headlights washed the ledger of my life flat.
He or I was unnecessary. Nothing had taken anything. The contracts were never signed, the debts never owed. The future had been a rehearsal for nothing. My body had been the experiment, the measure, the margin. I had performed, obeyed, surrendered, but the world never asked for me.
Maybe the devil exists only for people who believe life has always been a fair exchange. Maybe all that pressure, all those expectations, all the bruised sky in my hair and the red of car lights on my cheeks, none of it was reckoning. None of it was judgment.
I was lying on the road, neon dripping down my skull, every color pressing and bleeding, and realized that hell had been an illusion. That the ledger had never existed outside of me. That nothing had been stolen, and nothing had been kept. Somewhere, a girl was still choosing between crayons. Somewhere, a future was still being promised to no one in particular. And I understood: maybe collapse, surrender, this impossible weight, is expectation folding back into itself, and in that infinitesimal, absolute moment, I am God, and God is me.
Or perhaps, if nothing is owed, nothing demanded, nothing real, what even remains?