Buffy the dog in Highland Park, Los Angeles 3/28/2025

1. I don’t know when I started saying that pink was my favorite color. I don’t remember the first time I said it aloud to someone other than myself. For the longest time, I would answer that it was either blue or orange, depending on which day it was and how I felt in that moment. But when it became pink, I don’t recall.

2. The first time I actually do remember it being real was the day I turned eighteen. I got a baby pink-tinted diamond tattooed on my lower left back. A diamond because it’s my birthstone, pink because its my favorite color, I told everyone back then. I guess I tell everyone the same thing now, though, since both remain true.

3. That same year, 2010, the year I become an adult through the construct of age, the year I move halfway across the country to be by myself for the first time, the year I start to become a different person, my mom buys me a used pink prom dress for my senior prom. It is too big on me and it is over the top, but I feel complete when I’m wearing it. It is a pale pink tulle strapless corset top with probably ten or more yards of fabric puffing out at the hips. I look ridiculous but I feel as pretty The Good Witch.

4. When I am at my senior prom with my high school boyfriend and my high school friends, I am not actually performing the role of girlfriend at prom for the boy I’m dating, but I am performing the role of girl at prom who gets to have her night in the dress she wants.

5. My prom date’s mom used to do my nails for me in their guest bedroom that she set up as a makeshift nail salon. I would always ask for pink, except for one the time I asked for yellow. It was hard to text on my ancient iPhone 4 with tips. Such tiny screens, such big nails.

6. She took me into the bathroom once and pulled her gigantic wedding ring off of her finger and handed it to me. This might be yours someday, she said, and she meant it. I loved her. She was like a second mom to me, in the brief time that I knew her. The ring was a platinum band and the most giant ass diamond I’d ever seen in person, maybe just as big as any of Kim Kardashian’s.

7. I remember that at least two of his ex girlfriends before me had dated girls after him. There was Jenny, who I shared a middle name with. She was always nice to me once me and my boyfriend started dating. It was the kind of care that wasn’t supposed to happen, that they tell you to be weary of. She must want something, she’s probably meddling, the movies would relay from the screen to my brain. But that was never it. She was genuinely a nice person.

8. His other ex girlfriend, Bella, I never met, but I knew what she looked like. It seems that he had a thing for femme lesbians, because after we broke up, that’s what I realized I was. There were actually a couple years in between the final move to college that was so deeply painful to do, and the moment where I got fucked by another woman, where I understood that this was where I needed to be a long time ago.

9. Urban Dictionary user ZapThePixie defines pinkette as One with pink hair. Mainly a girl. Lol.

10. Oxbow Brewing Company, a brewery in Maine, defines Pinkette as a mixed-fermentation grisette aged on whole Montmorency cherries.

11. I shattered my phone screen one time while masturbating. I was sitting on the floor in my first apartment, home alone while my girlfriend was at work and my roommates were out. I propped my phone up on an open drawer of my dresser with the camera setting open so that I could see myself reflected back at me. My phone was white and wrapped in a giant sticker of a hot pink flower field with a soft pink sky. Shortly after it shattered, it got stolen anyway, so I never had to deal with fixing it.

12. My room in my first apartment was painted a light beige, but my lamps were all pink, making the room feel like me. I got a grey and white kitten off Craigslist from a lady in Queens and we named her Mafia and dyed her white hair blue with dog show hair dye. When it faded, we dyed her white hair pink with red food coloring but it only lasted a few days. Now she is just grey and white, and has been for the past twelve years. Her nose is a little pink heart.

13. The first time I actually do paint a room pink is when I move out of my apartment and into my girlfriend’s six months later. Her kitchen is a neon sea foam green and she lets me paint the walls a light rose pink with metallic gold molding around the windows and on the baseboards.

14. I think about how if it were today, I would have made the light rose pink a pastel bubblegum pink and the moulding would be the same but a satin finish, a true monochrome. And I would probably paint the chipping tin ceiling to match as well. I think about how as I was growing into myself all those years I lived in New York City, all those semesters at an arts college, all of those projects that I just had too much freedom that it sent me spiraling into a lazy fit of not trying. I was only shifting through all these different gears waiting for the right one to click.

15. I went through a lazy Victorian phase, where everything was faux victorian-esque. My art projects, my Pinterest boards, the photos on my walls, the shit I would bring in from the side of the street. Like Marie Antoinette from 2006, like the Juicy Couture magazine ads from 2007.

16. I went through a Messy Painted Floral phase, where I thought for a second that I could be the next Rifle Paper Company.

17. I went through a Garbage Maximalist phase, where there was never a blank space on any of my walls, never a garbage book left on a stoop, never a note that was not hung up on a string of other notes above my bed, never an antique shop or junk store I left without a ceramic or statuette or teacup that called to me.

18. I went through a Psycho Pink Phase, where I painted every room in my apartment blush pink.

19. In 2016 I went through a Neon Pink Phase that hasn’t quite ended yet. Just the other day, I tell Chess I’m going to write out the addresses of all one thousand of our greeting card retailers and send them mail for a tradeshow in the godforsaken Javits Center we’re planning on exhibiting at. We only use two envelope colors– Pulsar Pink and Planetary Purple. A lot of P’s.

20. The real story behind the neon pink envelopes starts with a man I spent the night with a couple of times who was an iconic illustrator and graphic designer in the early 2010s. I met him at the very first trade show I attended; I was working my boss’s booth at the neighboring furniture fair on the other side of the building. She said, go meet my friend, he makes art. You two would like each other.

21. It was the year of single for me. And by year, it really only was six months before I found myself in another long term relationship. I am always in a relationship, it seems.

22. I remember waking up next to him, slipping away to use the bathroom in the Airbnb he was staying at outside of the Lower East Side and running into the host in the hallway when she startled me, the both of us groggy, half asleep– I’m a friend your guest, except it came out all garbled and twisted.

23. I wanted what he had. People loved him, people knew him for his style and his existence and his essence. His whole essence was hot neon pink.

24. We didn’t sleep together. We didn’t do anything except kiss a couple of times and share a bed for the night. We kept in touch when he went back to Seattle where he lived. He took a photo of me standing above him on the bed and sent it to me the day he flew back.

25. He came back several months later for a trip to the city and got a hotel room on the west side of Manhattan. The hotel rooms were the sizes of small walk-in closets with twin beds and a port-hole window. It felt like we were on a ship. I told him I met someone and that we were dating. It was Chess. We got drinks at the hotel bar and shared pink salmon and couscous in the restaurant downstairs and then looked up at the stars on the sidewalk. There was supposed to be a meteor shower that night.

26. I was falling out of the bed, his gin-filled body pressed against mine, we were just friends but it didn’t feel like he understood that. He was drunk and tried to kiss me. I left and we never saw each other in person again.

27. We like each other’s Instagram stories from time to time and now he’s pivoted from art to tech, or something like that. He moved to San Francisco, or somewhere else.

28. I guess you couldn’t call it sleeping your way into a business connection, but I guess maybe you could. We probably did dream next to each other.

29. I said to Chess, I want to quit my job and sell greeting cards, and he said that’s never gonna work, but then I convinced him to spend his savings on a tradeshow booth and then suddenly we were writing thousand-dollar orders to people we had never met, for stores we had never been to, in cities we had never traveled to.

30. I wanted to be surrounded by pink all of the time, so we found out how to buy neon pink envelopes in bulk so I could be.

31. My period makes me want to cry. I’ve wrapped myself up in a pink and butter yellow sweater I knitted when I went through my knitting phase. I’m sitting in my gold living room. I dreamt about someone last night that I can’t stop thinking about. When we were in each other’s lives, one of us was always on our period. Once mine would finish, theirs would start. It was a never ending cycle of fucked-up-ness.

32. I saw them in the parking lot with their boss’s dog once before the last time I went to LA. I was wearing bubblegum pink carpenter pants and a bandana. I didn’t know that we would run into each other. My version of praising them was dressing in their clothes, but in my colors.

33. I will not see them when I am in LA the next time I am there, but I know it’s all I’ll be thinking about. A wound that I fled from, that I put on hold. That I booked a flight to get away from. And I’ll be packing that same candy pink duffle bag with the same neon pink keychain I attached to it, shoving my same matching pink eye mask I wore on the train into the side pocket so that I can sleep on the plane. I wonder what it’s going to feel like.

34. I don’t feel like telling you about the history of the color pink because I don’t feel like getting up from the couch and sifting through my bookshelf to find my collection of color theory texts. I don’t remember any memorable details on the color, either. Does that make me a bad writer, not wanting to do my homework? Probably, but this is what a period does to you in the moment. Ugh. Maybe I will at some point.