Purple.

The bruises on your hips from that night, the wine-stained dress on your floor. You haven’t bothered to pick it up yet, not when touching it feels like an iron, not when he had no problem picking it off you as you cried. You turn in a mirror, searching for the skin he never touched- which is hard, given the way his hands traversed your entire being, uncharted territory under his palms.
They say that human skin cells regenerate themselves every seven years. In seven years, your body will be your own again. Somehow, you feel like seven years is too long a wait.
Tentatively, you press down on one of the plum-bitter bruises that tamper your chest. In two weeks the bruises will fade from your skin, yet you can’t help but feel like they will never really disappear, whether you wait two weeks or seven years. You turn away from the mirror. Purple has never really been your color.

Blue.

Your favorite painting is Portrait of a Girl, by Marcel Janco. It’s fifteen different shades of blue and it’s one of those paintings everyone’s heard of but nobody’s really seen, the type with a pretty name but an ugly face. The girl in the picture has stock white hair, pasty skin, tattered yellow clothing. Her face is indignant, yet you can’t stop looking at her. You wonder if that’s how he felt that night, when his staring drowned out the attempts you made to run away, call an Uber, leave as fast as he would let you.
You close your eyes, feel his gaze up your spine, undress in the pitch black of the night where you can’t see yourself breathe. He seems to have memorized every shade of blue on your body, yet his eyes never leave. You are a Portrait of a Girl.

Green.

The bile on the floor when you got home that night, the color of his eyes in the darkness, charming to sinister in a matter of seconds. Your arms swayed to the beat as he watched from across the dance floor, emeralds glowing under the disco overhead. He had called you beautiful when he didn’t even know you, just by your face he had immobilized in the quartz of his eyes. You curled against his breath in the room he dragged you to, you felt the green on your body, peering into your crevices as his hands moved wild.
You fell when you got back to your apartment, vomit spat from your mouth in chunks, dripping over the floor in a putrid shade of olive. Darkness fades into your vision as you slump onto the carpet. Even in the dead of sleep, you can still see flecks of green.

Yellow.

The color of your favorite sweater that you wear the next day, at the police station. The technician comes in, asks you to take off your sweater. The detective’s office is bleak and stoney. Like a child, you cling onto the wool as a security blanket.
You didn’t shower that night. Good thing too, as a cotton ball is swatched between your thighs with gentle fingers. The buttercup shade of your sweater smiles up at you from a chair, even as your hands bleach against your sides. It reminds you of the detective, coaxing last night out of your head, saying, “these details are important so we can identify him. What else do you remember?”
You tell him about the green eyes, the purple dress, his strong hands you couldn’t squirm away from. Privately, you think forgetting will be a blessing.

Orange.

The flicker of the fireplace you sit in front of when you tell your parents. You’re home for the holidays, you sleep in your childhood bed for the weekend. You sit next to the fire, the words fall from your mouth in a moment of despair. “He hurt me. I said no, but he hurt me.”
That night, you learn what it sounds like when your father cries, you hear your mother’s heart breaking in her chest.
And horribly, your family begins to treat you like a glass doll, tiptoeing around your scars, voices quieting when you step into a room. Your Dad tries to hug you from behind and you flinch on instinct, you brush the hesitation in his eyes as he freezes and pulls away. You try to reach out, to say it’s okay, but no one dares to touch a burning girl. You go to bed with your childhood nightlight on, watching the halo of orange it casts upon your wall until you fall asleep.

Red.

The color of the paint one of the activist girls hands to you to dip your hand in. Your therapist encouraged you to join the movement. “You can do this,” she had said. “You are a survivor.”
So you do as the girls instruct. They say, ‘Undress, but leave your bra and underwear on. Dip your hands into the paint. Put that shit all over your body, in every place he touched you.’ Verbatim.
You stand, red paint on your hands curdling like blood as it begins to dry. Cautiously, you press one palm to your stomach, your hips, covering yourself in handprints. You shudder. You can feel his hands in every place the paint cools.
You want to hide away.
But, the wave of girls behind you has other plans. They parade onto the street, red handprints on their thighs, their chests, their shoulders, holding signs. People on either side of the road stare as you pass by and it’s as if they can see right through you with their taught gazes and awed faces. They’re surveying you like he did, eyes raking the handprints on your body just as cruelly as he made them, so really, what’s the difference?

You are a tapestry woven of colors you didn’t choose, a tapestry of a scene you never asked for. Everywhere you go, you are a tapestry. You are on display.