Prompt: Innocence - March

Pink

Prompt: Innocence 

I hate the colour pink. 

It’s the colour of her dress, her lips, the ribbons she always wore in her hair.

The sweetness of it, the innocence of it, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Pink doesn’t suit me. 

It never has.

 She was the innocent one, the pretty one, the fragile one.  I was dirty under the fingernails and she had been surrounded by fine things her entire life.  She was thin and graceful, so sickeningly sweet—giving smiles so easily, while I kept them to myself.

I had hoped, at first, we could be friends.  I’d grown up surrounded by men and boys and never really knew what it was like to have another girl around.  I remember that one dusty afternoon, my father had come home with a girl my age timidly peeking out from behind his legs.  She was wearing a pink dress, lips and cheeks flushed from the cold.  I didn’t think it was unusual at first--- my father had a habit of this. We still called him father even though my brothers and I were all orphans from the street.  He was the only father we’d ever known, the only one who had loved us.  We came from a life of begging and stealing, a life of coldness and hunger, but she was different.  She wore pink and blushed pink and was pretty in a way that reminded me of china dolls, with pale, delicate skin and fine, high cheekbones. 

How she had come to us had always remained a mystery to me.  I only knew that she had been saved from the street, sheltered, luckier than all of us.  I couldn’t help but think it was unfair.  She would never understand me.  I would never understand her.  She was used to playing piano and doing needlepoint and sipping tea with soft hands.  I was rough and skinny and dirty with calluses on my hands.  I came to despise the colour pink.  It was the symbol of her, of the refinement of girlhood, a life I could never have back.

We were very different.  I don’t think father ever wanted to realize that she wasn’t happy with the life we had.  Winters were hard, we barely managed to scrape by and food was always scarce.  We all had to work.  For the rest of us, anything was better than begging on the streets.  But she was forced into a hard life, and it was wrong to me.  She wasn’t like me.  She was like a lovely flower, meant to be protected and pampered, meant for fine things. 

Secretly, I hated her as I hated the colour pink.  I knew she was too fragile to live this life.

I was right.

She was too delicate, and contracted illness.  After much pain, she passed away, much too young.

We buried her with a small ceremony, the best that we could do.  She wore that pink dress in the coffin, lying on her back, broken and small-boned and vulnerable.   Sometimes, I can still see her face; eyes closed, face pale, beautiful, even in death.  She was always smiling, cheerful even in our hardships.  She had entered our bleak world and made it colourful.  She was like a breath of fresh air, a sip of cool water, a little ray of sunshine in a dark and gritty world.

She should have been a princess, because she was special, and innocent; not like me, who’d never known anything except wrestling in the mud.

I just didn’t want to admit it, but the beauty of her, inside and out, made me wish that I could wear pink too; even if only for a moment.