I lied.
A long, long time ago you asked me what my favorite color was. When things were new and clean and easy. Still dancing around in the getting to know you stages. Some days I swear, years later, I am still just getting to know you. But that's besides the point. The point is I lied. You asked me what my favorite color was and I said red. Red is okay, I guess, but red? Plain red, Crayola red, the tin lunchbox your mother bought you for your first day of school red, isn't me.
I always liked blue. Blue anything. Ocean blue, not a cloud in the sky blue, so many clouds in the sky it's almost actually gray blue, the eye color I always wanted blue, favorite shirt blue, toilet bowl cleaner blue, internalized depression blue, art museum walls blue. Blue. I liked blue.
But here I am, saying to you without hesitation that my favorite color is red. And you say that yours is green. You're going on about how our favorite colors are Christmas colors and I am wondering when it was that I decided I needed to be someone other than myself around you.
Many years later, too many years, I am driving down Main Street with a parade of stop lights ahead of me. The colors are doing that thing when my eyes blur them out of focus. Red, green, green, red, red, green. To stop or to go. Part of me is thinking how fascinating it is that we have programmed our brains to subconsciously associate colors with actions and the bigger part of me is thinking about you. And somehow I find this is always the case with everything. As many times as we are next to each other in my line of vision we can never be together. I am talking about the stop lights but I am thinking about us. Green and red can never be on the same stop light at the same time. As soon as I leave, you show up. And it's got me thinking about how we were never really on the same page. How it's taken me this long to realize that no matter how badly either of us may have wanted it, we can never exist together.