She stared at the wall. Daring it to change. Wanting it to change to what it had been before.
Was it a day before? It didn’t smell so new. She turned away from the offending wall. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to look out of the window. She was, maybe, just a little scared. Just ever so slightly…
She wrapped her arms around her body to still the shaking. To stall the thinking, if only for a second. For that moment.
He’d asked her. She’d told him. Honestly. And yet, as he always did, did it anyway. He didn’t care that it would be weeks before she could change it. Longer still, for the memory of the horrid colour to fade.
She sat on the white tiles. Put together in perfect symmetry. The tiles had been her only input into this damned room. The only input in his life. She folded her knees. She wrapped her arms around her legs.
She would have to live here. She would have to, for days on end face the redness she detested just so that she could keep that little bit of him. That part of him which was contrary, rebellious. Foolish and so beautifully tasteless.
She buried her face between her knees. He should have…
Oh, she couldn’t hear her own thoughts in the loudness of this damned room. She felt too much here. In all this redness, that he’d chosen after she’d refused it. This redness which reminded her.
She jumped off the floor. Shaking furiously. She paced trying to calm down. She blinked back tears.
Oh, she hated red. She hated it all. She hated it!
She threw herself against the wall. Had he painted this section? Had he laughed when he thought how’d she’d react when she saw it? What had he thought as the room transformed from white to this damned…
She ran her hand on the wall. She hated red. She hated red. She closed her eyes and saw him in the street in his Nike running shoes, his faded green shorts she’d promised she’d one day burn, and that old greyed white t-shirt that had been soaked red from the gun shots that had torn his heart apart.
She could feel his body lying on the pavement. The eyes of the passer-bys who only whispered amongst themselves in surprise in shock, in pity for the man’s family, in relief that it wasn’t anyone they knew.
He’d been such a good man, despite his horrid taste in colour. He’d been so stubborn. So…
She opened her eyes and looked at the window across the room. In here. Time had stood still. In here, his spirit lived on. In here, he would have the red he’d wanted. He’d have his mischievous moment of trouble and he’d laugh as she struggled to find furniture to match the wall colour.
She tore herself from the wall and walked to the window that overlooked the pavement where he’d taken in his last violent breath. People walked over his washed out blood stain. Already ingrossed in their own lives.
She turned away from the busy street and looked at the red wall that she would forever hate and love just because it had been the last thing he’d given her.
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