Color Connotation

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The night was quiet when she left. It was expected; She had been sick for so long that her hands trembled at the slightest movement. Her ivory skin had paled and grown to be tinged gray and splotchy, and she had to have aid to tie her colorful head scarf to her head. When she had first grown to be sick ten or twelve years ago, that head scarf- bright and colorful- signified hope to him.

The loss of the tight curls in his mothers hair had been, quite possibly, one of the worst moments of it all. The way the strands fell to the ground as he watched her shave it away, line after line, just a couple of months after his eleventh birthday. It had been so thick, so large; Her hair had stood proud and upright and healthy in an afro. She shaved it before her first appointment, and she laughed about it, and she picked her son up to twirl him around and say, "I look amazing even without my hair, now don't I?"

He wondered, feebly, sometimes. Did she say that just to cheer him up? When she looked in the mirror, did she miss her hair? Did she resent him the way he resented himself for keeping his?

Those bright colors on the buildings downtown, depicting women and hawks in dances and twirls only spoke grief to him. What people would analyze as a ballerina dancing and swirling on a lit stage, he would analyze as a woman dancing until her legs were sore because she was losing the ability to feel below her neck.

He remembered looking up to her when he was thirteen as she ran product through his curls. Trying, at that young age, to spot envy in her eyes. Trying desperately to barede himself over the fact that he was healthy. His skin was full and his eyes were bright. Where her hands, even then, had trembled, his own had been steady. Where she had struggled to stand and do so much as cook, he cooked for her and he ran every morning.

The entire business he worked in was healing. Healing others, helping them through. He worked for free, occasionally, for foster children and orphans. He helped everyone that came through the doors of his office because his goal, his entire life, had been to help.

Helping when his mother was too ill to get up to shower. He carried her at the age of fifteen. He learned to cook, stole her notebooks full of recipes. He altered them to make them cheaper so she wouldn't have to fret. He took up jobs for that same reason despite her insistence against it because he saw how tired her eyes looked-- Even if he couldn't decipher the exhaustion from work apart from the exhaustion of sickness.

The irony came when he couldn't help himself.

No longer could he view himself as the hog of the health because he had been the only one in his family to retain it. From his mother to his brother that had died as a child-- from a different branch of the same sickness- he had always been the healthy one. Stable.

Now he was simply the hog of life.

Going about his day as he rushed to find a new office was horrid. Everywhere he looked he saw the haunting of his family, saw his mothers smile in a woman who sipped her coffee gingerly. Saw his brother in the face of a fifteen year old, wondering absently how his brother would've looked, should he have lived to be that old. 

Months passed and he had a new office, all to himself. He could decorate it and paint it all he wanted so long as it was restored when, if he left.

It was so void.

No longer was his mother with him. Even just to talk, as she had been last time, because she was too ill to help him. His brother couldn't dip his hands into the paint and press them into the wall to leave an eternal  mark of him that would be left on the walls forever.

As he popped open the paint cans- black, purple, and gold- he stared down into the paint as though it were a black hole to suck out his soul. As he stirred it, the void deepened.