In the Pink Room
Deanne Gertner
The girl loved the pink room, its color soft and as sweet as cotton candy. Whenever in the room, she got the same feeling as at the top of the swing’s pendulum. The whooshy feeling that danced behind her belly button. The way her tippy toes reached for the edge of the sky, like if she could just get high enough, she’d be able to sail into the heavens, let the edges of her body dissolve into the ether. They said: get your head out of the clouds, come back down to earth, stop all that daydreaming. The girl wouldn’t, couldn’t listen. In the pink room, everything else—all those stifling expectations—faded away. In the pink room, she let her eyes focus in and out on the tiled floor, let the geometric patterns go fuzzy then sharp. In the pink room, she could stretch out every breath until it was rope thin, and dissipate into the spaces between each exhale and inhale. In the pink room, she could just be. Be quiet, be sad, be brave, be angry, be joyous, be fearful, be content, be grateful, be jealous, be surprised, be distraught, be inspired, be dreamy, be herself. In the pink room, the petals of her mind and heart unfurled. She blossomed. She bloomed.
ABOUT THE WRITER: A Colorado native, Deanne Gertner holds a MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from Regis University. Her writing has been published in Into the Void, Atticus Review, Scintilla, Treehouse, and Infinite Rust. She sits on the board for Lighthouse Writers Workshop and founded the award-winning experimental arts agency, Hey Hue, in 2018.