I suffer from/am blessed with synesthesia, I smell, taste, and feel color. Blue has always been vital to my being, whether it is the color of pajama sets and bed sheets, or speech bubbles on Facebook Messenger, I have grown too attached to blue that the blank whiteness of this document loses its neutrality and starts to hurt.
They say blue is a cold color, then they associate it with a feeling so strong that it has the same symptoms of a heart attack, they turn it into a synonym for heartbreak, and make it the sponsoring color of music meant for heartaches. I associate blue with hearts because I have a list of life elements and they are all blue: writing ink, oceans water, night skies, and I recently added to that list the sanctuary I made of your-my conversation. It is 3:57 pm and I am having the blues, listening to blues, thinking of blues. It is 3:58 pm and my body is burning, no amount of tears my eyes shed can cool me down so no amount of colorologists can convince me that blue is a cold color.
Two months ago, I discovered that the poor human eye was not able to distinguish between green and blue until recently, the poor human mind could not read blue, and I wonder if that means we only recently started to know grief.
I have grown too attached to blue but they opted for green in traffic lights. They preferred green to blue when it takes blue to make green; Blue is the parent. They favored green over blue when blue is the third primary color and the other two family members, feisty red and powerful yellow, are already present in traffic lights; Blue is the parent that never came home. Green stands for progress. Green is a sacred color in Islam. Green is the color of every “environmentally-friendly” label when mother earth is more blue than green, and I wonder if that means this planet has seen more grief than peace.