The form asked for door color

The form asked for door color.

I wrote red.

Looked at the door.

Crossed it out.

There's a sticker inside the door frame—

the paint code, from whenever

the building last repainted, before I got here.

I looked it up.

The name that came back

was not red.

I know this word from art class,

from a tube I never bought,

from descriptions of things

that are aggressively specific—

not red the way stop signs are red,

not the red you mean

when you just say red

and expect everyone to know.

Vermillion.

I stood in the doorway

with the form in one hand

and my phone in the other

and looked at the door I have touched

every single day for two years.

I've been wrong about this.

Not wrong in a way that mattered.

Wrong the way you're wrong

about a ceiling height

or a person's middle name—

something that never needed precision

until someone asked for it,

until the form required a specific word

and the word you had

turned out to be approximate.

I wrote vermillion.

It looked strange in my handwriting.

I left it.