Ryoma Ikeda

I Am Not One Shade

I used to think I had to pick one color.

The tidy kind. Something soft enough to disappear into.

But I was born in between. Born of contradiction.

Where one language paused, another tried to finish the sentence.

Where silence sat longer than it should have.

My mother taught me to fold things small—

laundry, paper, emotion. To never speak louder than needed.

My father believed in numbers, in structure, in things that made sense,

but I was the smudge on the margin, the ink that ran,

the question that stayed too long in the room.

I carry the green of our garden in the back alley,

where herbs grew in takeout containers and nothing died easy.

I carry the red of every school form signed late,

the blue of every apology I didn’t know how to give.

And still—I bloom. Not like a painting, but like a spill.

Uncontained, a little too much. But honest.

You ask what colors make me.

I’ll tell you: it’s the ones that wouldn’t mix,

the ones that stained the brush, that made it impossible

to start over clean. The ones that stayed.

That’s how I know I’m here.

That’s how I know I’m mine.