Pink

The tea is called passion. It's bitter. And pink. The directions on the box say that "for each lusty, hot cup of Tazo Passion, use one bag and allow to steep for five minutes." She doesn't know how "lusty" the tea is but she smirks at the bitter part. She wonders when the color pink came to represent passion...love...lust. The way she sees it when a heart bleeds it bleeds dark red. Perhaps that's where the pink comes from- a bleeding heart. Clearly the deep rich blood has been filtered with something lighter, fluffier and safer for public consumption. Something like cotton candy. Love is not cotton candy sweet to her, it is dark crimson that comes gushing out of a jagged cut that a surgeon couldn't stitch up fast enough...though one had tried.

Joshua Collins was everything a woman is supposed to want. He had graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, had his doctorate from Johns Hopkins and was a renown cardiologist by 40. He had a pretty face and a prettier body but that wasn't the sum of his parts he also spent his vacations donating his medical expertise. In short, a modern day saint and to top even that off he'd had the ideal childhood and perfect parents that are the stuff of fairy tales in this modern age. What he'd seen in her she still didn't know. What she did know was that he was perfect and for a brief moment she was perfect with him. The problem with perfect is that when it's taken away from you there is nothing left to aspire to.

She looks down at her tea again and thinks that love is not the only thing that is dark crimson. Perfection is as well, as it pours out of a terrible gash in the neck of your lover while you lay amongst the remnants of your car. It is the color of the sirens and the flashing red lights, of the flares and the firefighters, of the ambulance that speeds along but can't possibly move fast enough and finally the color of the sheets surrounding your love after the doctors and the nurses have gone and it's just you and him in the silence and your brain struggling through the fog to understand.

She pushes away her pink "lusty" tea and struggles to her feet- her ever expanding belly making it more difficult to sit and stand these days. She rests a hand on the swell of her stomach and stares out the window.