My mother assigned me a favorite color before I was even born. All of my baby things were pink. Pink everything. 

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It only seemed appropriate to then move my tiny form into a pink house.

Okay, salmon, I guess. Sort of a dusty salmon. But to me, it was pink, the color of a castle, my own castle where I was the princess and I ruled over a land of Barbies and cats and goldfish and plush dogs. 

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My first bedroom—later my sibling’s room—had a forest-scape painted on the walls. My dad painted it himself. Trees and bushes and butterflies. My second bedroom, which I would have for the rest of my time living in the pink house, had—you guessed it—pink walls. 

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The upstairs bathroom had been painted to look as if the interior was underwater. Bright blue, with sponged on fish and other sea creatures. When I was in the bathtub, I was Ariel. 

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Outside, in our front yard, a giant blue spruce grew into the shape of a huge Christmas tree. My dad would cover it in ornaments the size of my head and big electric lights during the holiday season. 

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It’s hard not to glamorize that house, since I lived in it as a child and everything seems a little brighter before the age of twelve. But every time I think back to the pink house, I just remember feeling like I had the coolest home ever and I was the princess in my dad’s stories. I could talk to the animals in a room that looked like a forest and I had the world’s biggest Christmas tree and my house was the color of the Disneyland castle. 

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When I was twelve, the pink house became too expensive and my dad’s job too far away. We sold the pink house to a family with a little boy and they claimed that the murals were perfect. I was weirdly okay with it all. A prince to take my place in my castle while I moved on to a new land. 

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They chopped down the blue spruce to create a front yard of grass. They painted over the murals. But their worst offense:

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They painted my castle white and gray.