A LITTLE STORY: RUBY

 (This was a descriptive paragraph I wrote during University, in a class that promised to be absolutely fantastic, but was ruined by bureaucracy and systems. Long story. Anyway, instead of working to write an essay - our professor made us write things like this. Until she retired early due to illness. This was one of the few finished pieces, aimed at describing the colour 'RED')

Ruby was red. Since the day she kicked her way out of her mother's red, red womb, until the day that she closed her eyes with a laugh and a smile, Ruby lived like she was on fire. Some said that below the milky white of her skin, all one could ever see was the red of her muscles, the red of her insides – the red inside us all. Ruby laughed whenever things got quiet, and cried whenever she felt like it. Walking with Ruby was like riding a roller coaster – the constant ebb and flow of emotions dragging you uphill and speeding you back down at record speeds. That was Ruby. Ruby would let her white hair fall onto her face, and she'd leave it there, hair that always glowed with a blinding light when the sun touched it – perhaps simply because, like the sun, her core glowed with that same too-hot-to-touch red. Ruby was a firecracker, setting off like a rocket, and then bursting into a thousand brilliant, glittering pieces. That was a day for Ruby. There was no halfway with Ruby – either she loved you, or she hated you with every fibre of her being. She made it a habit to make love at least once every day. Loudly. She also made it a habit to sing loudly on her way to school, work, home, every day. Ruby was red. Was, and I guess in some ways, she still is. Like a star, her warmth still radiates through space and time, speeding across space for billions upon billions of years before it happily retires into a cozier, perhaps slightly cooler star. But she'll never cool off completely. And even now, as I hold the elaborate porcelain urn (red, of course) that holds her oddly copper-coloured ashes, I can feel her heat, her heart, warming me up to my core. Perhaps that's what Ruby was trying to do – remind us all about the red that lurks inside of us. The red that, although hidden behind a cream, or gold, or brown, still peeks out occasionally to remind us that yes, we are human, and yes, it's okay to let go a little bit. That red is a part of us, and perhaps we should embrace it a bit more.