Prompt #124

Getting sappy this morning. It happens.

Well, it’s a month of anniversaries and remembrances, which makes me nostalgic. I’m lucky to have loved so many people. And I’m lucky to have been loved in return. But it’s simply a truism that some people are better at giving love than others.

If I were to give the loves of my life colors, I would paint S a medium gray, for he was both happy and sad, but mostly sad. And I loved his sadness until I didn’t anymore. M was yellow, a bright, harsh yellow, like squinting at the sun on a cloudless day. Sometimes, he was too beautiful for me to look at. B was blue. A royal blue. So blue and buttoned up. So hidden. And F was green. A deep emerald green. A weed green. Moss. Wet leaves and fir trees throwing deep shadows over everything. But now there is K. Oh, my K, what color are you, my love? You are every color at once. You are limitless color, like the sky, like the bowl of black overhead at night, and the wondrous baby blue of morning.

Told you I was sappy today.

I learned recently that my step-daughter and her spouse both see numbers as colors! So “1” is red and “2” is green, and so forth. (They each have their own set of colors/numbers, and it was super fun to listen to them discuss (argue?) over which colors are correct!)

Have you read anything by Maggie Nelson? She wrote an entire book around the color blue (“Bluets”). Here’s a description from the Wave Books site: “A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue…” Here’s a few lines from the first paragraph:

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious.

(If you’ve not read The Argonauts, I recommend it!)

You probably see where this is heading…

1. Write a story that uses color(s) in some way: to define characters, to set a mood, to start your imagination going…..

2. You can use old boyfriends/lovers, as I did, above. Or maybe numbers are colors!

3. You can invent a character who wakes up green, or purple, or polka-dotted….

4. You can write a story about a character who has painted all of their possessions one color, or who suddenly sees everything as red, or who moves to a new city where everyone seems to be wearing yellow.

5. You can write about an object that is a color, such as a red mug, or the white sheets on your bed.

6. Or you can simply title your story with the name of a color, such as “Red,” and see where that leads you.

7. Anything goes! This is Color Week!

That’s it! Four hundred words or less in the Comments if you want me to read your story.