Burgundy
She slammed the trunk of her 2002 Acura with a sigh.  This was it.  She was offically headed off to Westminster University.  Her phone buzzed; it was a text from her sister Shelby.  It was a good luck text; she quickly thanked Shelby and headed inside to double check that she didn't leave anything behind.
Clarissa had lived at 2043 Westbrooke as long as she could remember.  She remembered when Shelby was born and Clarissa sat on the wooden floors holding her.  Every little change made to the house was embedded in Clarissa's memory.  Walking the same path she had for 19 years, she arrived at her bedroom. 
The bedroom was bare except for a full size mattress set and the dark tan paint on the walls.  Carefully examining every part of her room, she looked under her bed and found an old box.  The box was a shoebox painted over in a burgundy.  It had 2001 written in the bottom left hand corner.  Curious, she opened it. 
Suddenly, everything she didn't want to remember came back like a monsoon.  Images flashed in her mind.  Jake and Clarissa in the Chevy, him holding her tight as the rain pounded down in sheets after Clarissa found out her brother had terminal cancer.  Their last date, a blob of lavender scented candles, entangled legs, and rumpled bed sheets.  Graduation day.  They were both dressed in corny graduation gowns that she hated, but all she had to do was look into his shiny navy eyes to forget. 
She collapsed. 
She hit that wood floor that she always loved, felt everything she was leaving.  Suddenly, it was unbearable.  The walls that used to comfort her seemed to be choking her.  The sky she had woken up to every morning seemed haunting.  She took the box and ran.
She ran until she reached her brother.  Until her lungs burned and her heart pounded; until sweat wasn't just beading but streaming down her face.  Every stride she took felt like her last.
The grass softened her landing when she bent on her knees to catch her breath.  Her tears seemed to be stuck now, trying to fix the drought in her heart.  Similar to a soliloquy, Clarissa spoke.  She said everything with her eyes closed, imagining what her brother's expression would be.  She told him about the baby she couldn't save.  About how when she delivered her stillborn, Jake's shiny navy eyes now terrified her.  She told him about how she never knew that fire could be blue, or that the blue parts of the fire are the parts that will burn you the most. 
She recounted everything.  The nurses' pitying expressions as they took the baby away.  Jake slamming the door to her room, when she watched his tennis shoes run away for good.  She told him about when she was alone.  When the only person that knew about the baby was gone.  She softened her voice as she talked about how her Grammy used to tell her when one person dies, another is born.  Her voice shook with emotion as she tells him about the stiffness in her bones as she pulled her sweatpants on.  The elevator has seemed so slow for only rising a floor.  Passionately, she vocalized the agony she felt as she stumbled through the oncology floor to her brother's room that night, and found her father crumpled up in the chair and her mother pale on the floor holding Clarissa's brother's hand. 
She articulated the steps her mind had gone through in deciding God wasn't real.  God couldn't have taken her baby and her brother, she screamed.  She cursed her grandmother outside of her brother's treatment room and recalled that nobody gave her a second glance, because they had all seen this before. 
She took the box out and set it behind her brother's gravestone in the little patch of dirt where grass could never seemed to grow.  Burgundy was always her brother's favorite color.