I found you yesterday behind the bookshelf,

Cloaked in lint and chipped with years,

Forgotten under the dust that creases your waxy shell.

I don't quite remember the day that you went missing,

Nor the color you used to be.

The thin paper that wraps you has worn threadbare, 

Flaking and leaving you without a name,

Pigmentation erased

Under the heavy smudge of age.

Perhaps you were a lovely lilac,

Of such that kissed the sky when we went out on picnics,

Mom and Dad and I,

Lilac in our laughter and lilac in our hearts.

Or maybe you were a honeydew green,

Green like clover that shimmered pink with blooms,

Trembling under a checkerboard sheet where we sat

Beneath a lilac sky.

It could have been that you were gold,

Bright like the jangle of dollar coins,

Bright like the rays that burst through the powder sky,

As bright as the sun from where it births,

Illuminating checkerboard-sheet-honeydew-clover-brown-thing-in-the-grass.

You could have been brown,

The brown of the thing that slithers, streaked

In pale diamond dots and tipped with brown rattle.

Brown things come with fangs.

Perhaps you were a lovely lilac,

Of such that kissed the sky when Dad and I stood in the parking lot of the hospital;

The silence only thickened,

Palpable in the single pulse we shared

We shared a bloodline—

But half of mine was gone,

With lilacs in our arms and lilacs in our eyes.

Maybe you were a midnight blue,

Dark like the deepening hours of a desolate bedtime.

I waited for a goodnight kiss, my ear pressed to the wall,

Listening to the muffled grief of a bed half-empty,

Waiting for the lilacs in my fingers to catch fire

And melt through the palms of my hands.

It could have been that you were a crisp, clean, white,

Untouched like white crayons that grow brittle without use,

White like the calendar that sits in my lilac wall, 

Bleeding empty days and weeks and months;

They engulf me, 

Permeate me;

This heart has been bleached with my loss;

It is white to the core.

Perhaps you were a lovely lilac,

Of such that blackens the expanse below my eyes and smears my cheeks,

Lilac like the day two years, four months, and sixteen years after the picnic,

The day I slammed my crayon box onto the bookshelf of my room,

Watching the colors tumble like the fear in my stomach,

One of them falling behind the bookshelf

Like the weight in my throat when I 

Remember—

Lilac like the day when I lay my head on the wood grain,

Learning the names of all the colors in the world,

Or at least of the colors in a twenty-four-count box of crayon.

My mistake—twenty-three crayons,

Each and every one of them honeydew green and white and midnight blue and brown and—

Tearstained

With lilacs cloaked in lint and chipped in years, 

Forgotten under the dust that creases your waxy shells—

But tears are colorless, and I do remember the day you went missing.