R.A.I.N.B.O.W.

A young woman and the colors that surrounded her.

Red is her favorite color. So why she didn’t want to paint her kitchen that color is beyond me. Originally, she wanted to paint it this dark forest green, but then it dried and looked like a bunch of people came in and puked all over the walls. So we covered it with base paint again and repainted it a different color. This time she chose the color yellow. She liked it. She said it matched the living room.

All of the mugs in the house are officially mine, except for two. I am a coffee freak. I drink a cup almost every 4 hours. I’m the only one who drinks coffee out of the two of us. The two mugs that are off limits are her Army mug and the navy Chicago mug I gave to her as a joke 3 years ago. She only uses them in the winter when she needs a cup of soup or some hot chocolate, and heaven forbid they’re sitting in the dishwasher with a dirty load of dishes. I think it’s the training, still and forever, engrained in her mind. Stay organized. Stay prepared.

I am a political junkie and am always on the interwebs checking on what’s going on. In Iraq, she said she didn’t pay attention to the news a whole lot. Even now, she doesn’t. Doesn’t really care. It’s funny to see people’s reactions when she tells them that. People assume that because she’s military she’s all into what’s going on with the government and everything. “I’m tired of the real world,” she wrote in a letter once, “I wanna lose myself in a different one.” She told me she did a lot of reading over there. Care packages that had books in them were her favorite. She said she would only keep two books at a time with her. Too many books made for too much weight. She has a list that she made of all the books she wasn’t able to finish or didn’t get the chance to read. For Christmas, I gave her a library card (because I’m old fashioned that way, no Nooks or Kindles). She said that it was the second best gift she’d ever been given. I asked her what the first one was. She said, “You, idiot.”

No one on earth drinks as much juice as she does. Our fridge is packed with juice boxes. It’s as if she robbed a shipment truck of the stuff. And it’s the cheap juice that, you know, is laced with sugar and all of those bad things parents tell their kids not to have. Of course she runs every day and uses the furniture as her weights so anything she’d gain just gets burned off.

Beneath it all, she’s still a woman, and she still likes to do things that, you know, women do. Just because she knows how to disassemble a rifle and bench-press a Beijing tiger doesn’t mean she still doesn’t like to feel pretty or do girly things. There was one night she was feeling particularly down. We were still working on fixing up her new home, and it was around that awkward transition time when she was still trying to reacquaint herself with her old girl friends. She still has some of her army buddies around. I’ve never been quite sure how to incorporate myself into that part of her life, if I should at all. I mean the two of us have our own thing. She has her own thing with them, but even that wasn’t the same as what she had before she left. That night I told her I was going out to run a quick errand. I came back with 2 liters of apple juice and the brightest purple nail polish I could find at 8:00 at night. She taught me how to paint her nails, sipping our apple juice, and I recounted to her my unbelievable and very awkward encounter with my boss in the makeup aisle that night, and how I wound up shopping for nail polish with him.

Out of all the options, she chose to become a ginger. When she came back, one of the first things she told me was that she wanted to change something about her. Coming back to civilian life was a new chapter, and she needed to do something to show it. She decided against piercing anything or getting inked and went with changing her hair color. She knew that if she didn’t like it, she could always change it again or change it back, unlike piercings and tattoos. She planned to grow her hair out until it dragged along the floor. Her inspiration came from the movie Tangled. It was the first movie she saw after she came back. We still debate about who made the first move that night. I distinctly remember it being her, but she claims it was me.

We’re in love. That’s all there is to it. Nothing else really needs to be said.