The Color Red

The wine in my green goblet matched the deep purplish tone of CJ’s lips.  We were on our second, maybe third bottle, and the time had creeped somewhere past the midnight hour.  Other than the low volume music playing through the lap top speakers in the background and our soft voices taking turns asking questions and telling stories of things we had always kept to ourselves, secrets we were drunk and stoned enough to share with each other at that very moment, the house was silent.  Each creak and snap the house made as it settled in the dropping temperature of the night, echoed around us and reminded me of the recent changes in our lives, leaving just the two us to figure it out. But at least we had each other. And for that we were grateful.  

The porcelain hands held soft, graceful poses and landed just below eye level on the posts and stands that sat in front of us.  As CJ dipped his brush between the colors and stroked the paint in several directions along the fingers, trying to create something inspirational, my brush remained red. Each stroke of paint left the once pure white surface a deeper and darker shade. The color of fresh blood.  It was the only color I needed to express my feelings that night.  The color of fire, desire, love.  The color of passion, anger, and hate.  The brightest and most dominant color of the rainbow.  The one color that every person had inside of them, regardless of what projected on the outside. The color red. 

CJ stopped painting mid stroke and sat still, gazing at the red hand displayed in front of me. He had a majestic look on his face and told me he loved it.  It was just one color, but he loved it.  Because everyone loved red.  His wasn’t turning out the way he had planned and he didn’t like that he had chosen brown as one of the colors amongst the combination of brush stroke. It had dampened the mood he was going for.  So I let my red hand sit for a few minutes to dry and circled my brush in the grey water until it was clean.  I dipped it in pink and ran the thickness along his art from the wrist, down the forearm until the paint ran thin. I dipped it again and repeated the process.  I dipped it in yellow and started from the finger tip, running its unplanned path down towards the wrist.  CJ followed this and began adding more and more colors as well. We were creating something beautiful.  I told him that nothing we made was ever wrong, and if we didn’t like the way it turned out, we could just fix it.  His hand wasn’t bad, it was just simply unfinished.  So we kept painting.  The colors began to brighten and the brown was slowly covered by the fresh strokes of our brushes.  He began to smile. 

My red hand was dry, and although the simplicity of it was good, I too felt that it was unfinished.  I dipped the pointed tip of the smaller brush in black and started to paint thin letters in the palm and down the wrist. “We All Bleed Red” I painted. And as I backed away, I looked at CJ and we both smiled. 

I sent a text to Ben. “We are painting. You should be here with us right now.”  

It wasn’t until the next day that he responded, having been asleep when my message came through.  His response gave me chills then, but it wasn’t until weeks later, after CJ had died that I really understood. Maybe we had all somehow known what was going to happen and Ben’s dreams were some kind of warning of what was to come. 

“I had a dream about you last night.” his text read. 

"I met you at the end of a work shift, but it wasn’t at confidential, it was your own store.  I remember you had this set of red keys.  You were wearing layers and layers of coats and jewelry.  Somehow in the dream, you had all of these weights attached to you.  I said “lets go on an adventure” and we drove in a red vehicle to the hillside overlooking the ocean and the sun was setting.  You started taking off the layers and layers and dropping the weights in the grass.  We somehow had paraglider’s in the car, pulled them out and ran off the hillside and flew in the wind.  It felt like a very freeing dream, letting go of the old and being in the now.  It was one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had.” 

Thinking back to the low music humming in the background that night we painted the hands, and the video that played on the lap top screen - Katy Perry, Rise - a song CJ and I had listened to over and over again, using our hands to create fists towards the sky as we belted the words with such force they seemed to be our own.  It was that red hand.  And Ben’s red dream.  And the red paraglider Katy had attached to her as she ran off the cliff and flew above the ocean in her video.  And the words she sang.  All of those things came flooding to me at once.  And only then, after CJ was gone, did I start to think that maybe it all meant something. The color red.