By: Michelle Chin
He always thought that blue was a depressing color, but she considered it her favorite,
so simply by that association it became acceptable. When he confessed this, she took great
amusement in the thought, telling him to distance himself from the culturally-imposed meanings
of pigments. As if to prove her point, the next Valentine’s Day brought elaborately handmade
cards with electric blue polka dots and milk-white hearts. He would later say that it smelled of
cyan, a comforting mixture of the winter sky and the sea.
Once, she read a particular poem of loss and renewal. It was written in black, but he
would consider the rhymes to be indigo in nature: tragic, of course, but vibrant in its remnants of
red. The words rolled over her tongue and he swallowed them. Years later, he would reflect
upon the memory of their aftertaste, and they would burn his throat with a fire like crimson. Until
then, he would hold them like cobalt, beautiful enough to carry, to kill.
Her ideal shade was azure, not just because of the actual color, but for the spelling of
the name. It showed itself in the bands of her hair, the cheap bracelets at her wrists, and the
mismatched patterns of her socks. Eventually, those same objects would appear at his house,
before crumbling into found moments of melancholy.
When they evolved as people and time emerged as a chasm between their old selves,
the color began to lose the brightness of her touch. No longer did he think of her smile as
periwinkle or her temper as cambridge. Her eyes were steel, like the cold rain that struggled to
drown out the cacophony of their disagreements: dirty dishes piling like dreams, dog-eared
pages of a borrowed book, honesty. Their witty exchanges were sapphire, sharp and
unpredictable, but had dimmed in recent months to a crisp cerulean. He saw the teal rain boots
at her feet and thought of his wet carpet before anything else.
They made peace on a stormy day. She collected most of her belongings, but he
couldn’t avoid the pieces she left behind - streaks of paint on canvas, a strand of hair wrapped
around the leg of the dining room table. Twilight reminded him of history and his mother’s new
cornflower-blue wallpaper brought him back to a certain someone’s scarf. When he gazed up at
the sky, he remembered the songs that slept on her lips and decided that such hues were
nostalgic.
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