Shades of Blue
specifically, 7bb889
[something different today. not fiction, not non-fiction, just some simple prose about my favorite color]
I close my eyes against the sun and wait for the bursts of colors. It’s always the same. The reds, the yellows, the golden browns and streaks of blue and shimmers of silver. There are cosmic bursts and sparkles. The Fourth of July, forever behind my eyelids. I float in that space where the colors are. I move through the light and the sparkles, through the flares and cosmic dust. There’s nothing there. No thoughts, no worries, nothing. Just space and ever changing color and scenery, explosions of light melded together, a psychic pictorial of peace.
There’s a different color today, a weird shade of blue that invades the peace. This is supposed to be my empty place, the space with no thoughts, no memories. But that blue. It’s part green, part yellow, all bloated with memories of a childhood committed to Polaroids all stuck together in a musty basement, where they lay forever because everyone is afraid to pull them apart.
That shade of blue holds so much. Running through the sprinkler in the backyard. Skipping barefoot across the street, trying to only let my bare feet touch the blacktop for just a second before the heat would sear my soles. The sound of the ice cream. The smell of chlorine. The feel of salt water on sunburned arms. The sound of a baseball game on the radio, charcoal turning to embers, the feel of pulling the chalk along the sidewalk to make a hopscotch board.
Everything is in this color. The reds and yellows shrink back from its power. The other colors, the other bursts of light that played across my eyelids always kept their secrets close. They never let loose their memories or the sounds and smells they held. They were just there. Protective. Warm. Peace.
The blue makes all the missing pieces of my life tumble down on me, burying me underneath its Polaroid tints; time worn photos of the lake upstate, a rowboat, a picnic, a birthday.
That was a different time. We were different people. Those streets are gone, the lawns are gone, the houses turned into apartments, the apartments turned into Kmarts, the Kmarts turned into hollow churches of empty beer bottles and broken skateboards, waiting for some other generation to claim it as its own while the rats and “For Rent” signs take temporary hold of the shells.
There are no more sprinklers in the grass, no more mad dashes across the hot pavement. There’s just that blue, that shade of blue, haunting, unforgiving, asking what we’ve done with everything it gave us.
I chase the blue away. I don’t own it anymore. We’re from the same time, but only one of us went forward. The blue is captured forever in the squared photos of the day. The blue belongs to a world I let go. I don’t want to look at its pictures. I want to peel each of them away from each other, removing the images, leaving just blank squares that will allow me to make up my own stories, stories that stay steeped in summer joy instead of delving into the darker shades that were visible to only me.
We live in different times. Your colors are different, your shades are bleached in nostalgia, your windows reflect things that happened long ago. My sunlight is not yours. In my time, your buildings have fallen, your roads are cracked and weary. I walk on fresh cement, I stand shaded by structures strong and solid. My colors are vibrant and new and not tinged with a longing that makes them muted.
Someday this will look like your world. I’ll long for it, I’ll see colors the way you see them. My buildings will be dust and you will be gone.