When I dream I see green and blue. Like I am traveling by car and looking up at the tops of trees where they meet the sky, vague and indistinguishable but it makes my chest hurt. When I dream there is sunshine and warmth and the colors are bright and pure as they undulate endlessly in the midwestern summer.
This is what I hold onto. For it seems I am now eternally in the winter of my life. I have been here for so long that I should have stopped keeping the time long ago. The colors of green and blue are here too. But they don’t come in the rustling of leaves or the buzzing of a field in the late afternoon light. Here, they are flat and inanimate, cold to the touch and unsympathetic in their sterility. The green in my cell is the green in the hall and the green in the bathrooms and the green in the treatment rooms. I can’t see the blue of the sky uninterrupted from the bar clad windows.
They tell me I might never be fit to leave this place. So I curl into myself and try to fall asleep again to drown out someone struggling and screaming in the hall. Maybe I will dream.