Pink

  Sometimes you see the world in color. And I don't mean that you look at a red sweater and notice how very crimson it is, touched with ruby and kissed shyly by scarlet. I mean that you step outside and the world just is a color. It's in your mood, in the clouds, in the barely glimpsed smiles of those who walk past you.
  Yesterday, my world was pink. Pink like the last remnants of a setting sun, tinged with a hint of orange that brushed it with bashful fingers before retreating slowly back into the sky. Pink like the cotton candy you give to children that floats onto their fingers, fuzzes up their mouth, sticky sweet and altogether nothing but sugary air. Pink like the feeling you get when your heart knows everything is right and you're where you're supposed to be and you feel invincible and infinite and nothing can stop you because you're gonna give it your all because you have nothing to lose.
  That kind of pink.
  And when it's that kind of pink, your soul does a little hop and skip and jump and tumble. It rolls in the grass and hugs itself and promises to never let go. Your cheeks are rosy with the promises of the future and your toes tingle, filled with the compliments of friends.
  But that kind of pink holds just a tiny tinge of doubt too. For, as much as you try to persuade your head, you know that the world can never be that perfect and that somewhere there lurks a rumbling navy of grief or a gruesome blood-red anger.
  For right now though, the world is pink. And I'm alright with that.

A Harmonization of Doubts, Despair, and Deceit

The confusion, the despair, the struggle, the unrest.
Thoughts in your head that wrestle and tear up your insides with their violence, beating bloody fist into your brain walls, thumping out a tattoo that echos hauntingly through your soul, graffitiing your thoughts with green spray-paint jealousy.
And then there's the guilt that spreads like a sickness through your head, overwhelming everything with darkness, swallowing up the light with one large and unsatisfied gulp. Because you shouldn't be like this. Jesus is enough.
If that's true.
Because right now, honestly, it doesn't feel like it.
You're in a valley. And the valley is so lonely alone.
"God is with me," the Ordinary Princess wants to believe. She weeps, curling up like a lost child, wrapping herself in her own courage.
"Jesus is sufficient," she offers the world in a shaky voice, built half on crumbling hope and past joy and forgotten love and decrepit doubt. The other half doesn't exist anymore. It's been shattered into pieces by uncertainties that pound it daily to dust.
She's so tired. So very tired of it all.
"Now I lay me down to rest," she whispers through parched lips, dry with longing for a more fulfilling world.
The darkness swoops in and swiftly consumes.

The Bride Did Not Wear White

  The bride did not wear white. As she stood silently, numbly, waiting outside the church doors, you could tell that her gown had once been as pure as newly fallen snow. But not now. Now it was torn and tattered and frayed and faded, scratched away at the edges by corners that grabbed pieces of it as it floated on by, muddied by the grimy puddles that jealously clung to its lacy hem.
  She didn't know what she was going to tell everyone. Surely they would question her, wonder why her dress was so filthy, her face tear-stained, her soul cloaked with sin, guilt, doubt, despair. She had greasy smudges that contaminated her past, this Ordinary Princess. And they didn't know that. They would expect her to be innocent. They would expect her to be beautiful. They would expect her to wear white.
  Un-pure, a cast-aside, ostracized from society. These thoughts sat heavy on her shoulders, causing her to slump under the gargantuan weight. A solitary tear slipped through, trickled, beaded sparkling on her cheek.
  Then the trumpets blared. She heard the crowd rise. It was her entrance. It was her time. It was her.
  And her dress wasn't even white.
  The doors were flung open, the crowd gasped a short intake of oxygen, the Ordinary Princess continued marching bravely down the aisle. She kept her eyes on her intended. Her prince was all that mattered. It was the longest walk she'd ever taken.
  At the alter, she looked into her prince's eyes, and they brimmed with happiness and love.
  "I'm so sorry," she whispered. "My dress... me."
  "What do you mean?" He answered, a truly puzzled look dancing on his brow. "You're the most beautiful creature on earth."
  She looked down, and caught her breath with her stomach. For her tattered dress had disappeared. In its place, she was dressed in honesty, laced with kindness, ornamented in love. Her sandals embellished with virtue, her veil a token of purity and peace.
  "How..." She started, but never finished. Her question was answered in His eyes. The eyes of her Savior, the eyes of her King, the eyes of her first true love.

When The World Is Right

  When everything makes sense. The buttery warm feeling at the bottom of your soul that courses through your body, alighting on your fingers, warming up your cheeks with that inward candle-lit shine.
  It's fall again, and everything around is slowly dying. The foliage takes one last sleepy glance at the world before retiring into their wispy corpses in preparation for winter and snow and ice and death. But the funny thing is, you've never felt so alive.
  When you can communicate with giggles and laughter and smiles. And the conversations are light, bouncing about the room like apple-red balloons that are filled with the imagination and beliefs of children.
  The leaves roll out the orange-as-an-autumn-fire carpet for you, and it's not plush or extravagant or carpeted with the rich. And yet its crunch is somehow just as satisfying.
  When God is so prevalent in your life that all you can do is praise Him. For you know that He alone gives you the perfect peace that wraps you up, lays you down gently, kisses you to sleep.
  The blue drifts lazily above you. If you stretched out your little hand far enough, you're convinced you could pull down one of those fleecy clouds, lace it around your fingers, knit it together to form a blanket of autumn sky.
  And when you were tired of it all, gather the memories together in a bundle in your arms and store them in a glass mason jar in the cellar. When winter comes, you could creep down the steps, lift it from the shelf, unscrew the lid, inhale the spicy scents of autumn life, of happiness, of fall leaves, of all that is right.

Of Corpses and Butterflies and Entomologists

  Like they took out your insides and gutted you clean, pulled out all the intricate and delicately beautiful machinery that made you tick, made you like pumpkin lattes and dislike pumpkin pie. Threw it all on the floor. Displayed: your raw guts, bloody emotions, your entire thought process stretched out and pinned down like butterflies on an entomologist's stark pallid board.
  That's how it feels.
  Ripped clean, then stuffed up quick, a shoddy taxidermist job. A synthetic smile pasted on with cheap glue, slowing flaking off to reveal the frustrated frown encased by chasms of deep and troubled wrinkles.
  It doesn't make sense.
  But then again, I suppose that anything in life rarely does. You hate yourself for letting your mind wonder down that vast enigma, and for dwelling on it.
  Because when it's bad, it's very bad.
  But when it's good? Oh, when it's good you feel as if you can unleash a fire hydrant and dance in the warmed-by-the-summer-sun water. You can fly, arms outstretched in a wingspan that encompasses everyone you love. You are no longer pinned to the board. Instead, you are a butterfly slowly crawling out of your lethargic winter sweater, itching to have adventures, struck by the beauty and majesty and wonder and azure hue of the sky. For when it's good, it's oh so very good.
  A buzz. A withdraw.
  A fluttering free butterfly. An empty corpse pinned to a board.