I had a picture in my head of a scene unfolding one day when I was journaling, and jotted some details down. I have no idea what's happening, in what way the narrator betrayed this "Dye," but I felt like sharing regardless. Very rough, but hopefully you get something out of it! 

(So much angst).

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Dye

    “I’m sorry,” I said over and over, stroking my fingertips along the dusty, ragged edges of an old album. I didn’t even know which one it was, who sang it, the songs on it. “I’m sorry.”

    I swallowed hard as the pain and panic and regret piled up and rose in my throat until it broke through the bottom of my conscience. I had finally cracked and the silence couldn’t hide his footsteps and the shuffling hands that had stopped shuffling.

    “About what?” he said, so completely knowingly. 

    He waited for a long second to wonder if he should move toward me and then didn’t. He stood there frozen in the knowledge he knew he would finally hear. 

    I kept looking at the corner of the album. Maybe because it was the last thing I knew I would remember before I assigned myself some empty spaces. Maybe because I thought the little, faded, crumbling corner would have some kind of excuse for me to use. Something to make me feel a little bit less inhuman. In any case, almost all of my motives were selfish and offered none of the protection I longed for.

    Before I put the record down, I had to make one final decision. I knew once we started unfolding, I would have no control over what I would want to do. If I would fight to get him back, if the sullen self-resentment would keep me from chasing after something I in no way deserved. I  had to decide whether I would cry or not. There was no option for me to fuel any morse than I did; I knew my tears were the only thing I could have control over. I decided that I would have to keep the tears in. 

    So, I set the album down in its box, on the top of the stack. 

    All of his records.

    All of his favorite records.

    I stood up and turned around. He might as well had been naked. His clothes covered his body parts in the same way his facial expression hid his heartbreak. I knew it was there, I’d seen it before. There was not much reason to cover it up. I knew it. He tried to cover everything, but I knew it.

    He kept his lips tight, tried to keep his eyes focused but not too focused. 

    “What?”

    “Dye,” I said. 

    Then I said it one more time, to remember what if felt like to say the name before everything changed, and what it would look like to see him respond to his name before we both understood it as tainted.