Saturday mornings are normally composed of sleeping until noon, eating brunch, and texting friends. But Saturdays, for me, are far from normal. Eight a.m. and stuck in a hospital where people in colored gowns walk around freely.

Both children and adults alike wear plain green hospital gowns— labels, one dying girl called it. But everyone knows labels don’t give you the whole story.

Moss green— label: Sick. Dying.

There is more to us than meets the eye, my room partner once told me. She was right— when I’d first walked in not too long ago, I thought they were freaks.

Freaks with shiny heads and freaks who were weak.

Frail. Defeated.

And that wasn’t me. Not at all. I was known as the fighter—the survivor. The one who would say what she was feeling and mean it with all her heart, body, and soul.

Not even a thing like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD], the doctors said, or lung disease, as I called it, could slow me down.

But like my room partner, that thought faded as the days passed and the strength left my body, and I, too, began to believe in the labels.

And soon, I heard the meaning of those labels in my thoughts, echoing when I spotted those colors.

I even heard it when my room partner, the one with the creative ideas and the blunt remarks about labels, disappeared from her bed, leaving me alone with her ghost that still haunts me and our memories she will never be able to talk about.

Sky blue— label: Male nurses. Cute ones you could look at, but never have.

They come and go, check on IV’s that are inserted in our arms, check our pulses, which seem to quicken with every breath, and smile with pity in their eyes.

Sometimes, if I’m in a group with other green-gowns, those beautiful sky blues flirt subtly, but I notice.

I notice a lot of things I wished I noticed before— the little things like the soft blush of the green-gowns’ cheeks and the light in the sky blues’ eyes or the things that happen with the spectrum of colors.

I see teachers in their maroon gowns giving out higher grades to help a student, who wears a small orange gown, get credit for her class.

I see sisters who seem perfect on the outside—and to the world— but are strained on the inside, creating tension between their delicate turquoise and magenta gowns.

All I see now are people in gowns, just different in their shades.

Periwinkle and pink—label: Female nurses. The people who care.

Sometimes I think about the way my life used to be on Saturdays.

How I was allowed to sleep until noon and how I could eat breakfast during lunch.

How I could not care less about life-threatening things, and how I could live care-free.

But now, I see things in more than black and white.

Those shades of gray show the people in the moss-colored gowns and how they suffer, how they know about both sides of life: the good and the bad.

These nurses, however, chose to work with the dying. And nothing confused me more.

Their smiles were bright, their eyes showed a kind of love I couldn’t create, and their hearts were pure.

Green, blue, pink.

Three colors that mean the world to me on Saturday mornings and set the bar for the other days—leaving me staring at colors that define us all.

It’s too bad that during every treatment visit, one green-gown is missing, their beds sterilized of their essence, and a cardboard box, usually small, with yet another label, marked ‘personal.’

“Time to go home,” pink-gown addresses me and motions for the door to the world. I smile—not because I’m free from the confines of my bed, or the confines of a sad place, but because there are more colors to see, more colors to figure out.

And because I can shed my color of green and find my own—one that wasn’t assigned to me by a dying girl with death in her heart.