My Favourite Colour Was Yellow
I wonder idly if you'd still like lemonade,
and sipping coffee on the porch
over a book.
The birds chirping drew your attention,
and you drew mine.
When I looked at you,
all that I could ever see was yellow.
So now, all yellow things
fill me with melancholic nostalgia for what is lost.
Ironic, isn't it?
Yellow.
The colour of happiness.
But you left and you took the yellow with you.
You took the happiness with you.
I remember you like this:
Sitting on the porch beside me.
Playing footsie and trying to wake up with the day,
always half tired from a late night -
always half sad with the taste of goodbye
waiting on the tips of our tongues.
I loved you like that, I think
with the taste of goodbye always on the tip of my tongue -
my tongue is still saturated in it.
Yet, I don't remember you at goodbye.
It's not a memory that feels like us.
It has been 1 year
8 months and
24 days since
I sat across from you in that little French diner.
You ordered steak and French fries for dinner.
I ordered risotto and you let me pick at your food -
you ate mostly the potatoes.
At the end of the night, you walked me to my car,
asked me to kiss you under the street lamp.
We stayed later than we thought we would -
our date that neither of us knew was one.
It felt like the beginning of forever, didn't it?
I think I fell in love at that very diner.
I was a goner for that girl and her potatoes.
You have been gone now almost longer than I knew you,
which makes me feel like a sucker
because my chest still burns every day.
The absence of you is an ember that I cannot put out.
The fire department warned me it is a safty hazard
and I told them that I know,
but there isn't enough water in the world
to quench the thirst I have to bring you back.
There is a hole at the center of me now,
and it is yellow.
There is a hole at the center of me now,
and it eats potatoes for every meal and drinks lemonade at dinner.
There is a hole at the center of me,
and it dances and laughs and uses cute accents in the car.
You are the missing piece that fills that hole,
the spice that is missing from every dish,
the constant ache of loneliness in a crowded room.
And I am a fool.
I have lost you for almost as long as I knew you,
but the truth is that I will miss you
for as long as this burning heart still beats,
and long after its ashes are scattered in the wind.
I will be long buried with my love for you
still leaking out of me.
The space I hold for you is as infinite and expanding
as the universe that we inhabit
and I will never be fully home again here.
There will always be a hole at the center of me.
It will always be yellow.