Colour My World

Blue

It's the colour of the pen you tap against your desk in time to your heartbeat as you look across the room. The colour of the eyes you meet before you both shyly look away. The colour of your sapphire earrings, one of which you nervously toy with when he bashfully asks you out.

This is the colour of your identical jeans--a mistake he laughs off but you excuse yourself to change. The colour of the cloudless summer day when he takes you on that first memorable picnic. The hot spark left lingering on your lips after he breaks off his passionate yet gentle kiss. The colour of your evening dress flaring out about the knees he takes you dancing after dinner with his parents and spins you, giggling, across the floor.

Overhead, the heavens fade from the last strains of pink, to dusky purple, to the deepest shades of the watchful night, the infinite expanse broken only by the watchful moon and her sister stars who wink knowingly at one another. Below on Earth, you meet his smiling eyes once more as he offers himself, his future, to you, offers his gift out of a Tiffany box; and you accept in a burst of a brighter tone that joins with his, a bright hue of emotion that all but lightens the silent, dark, endless expanse above.

Something old: His grandmother's engagement ring. Something new: The beginning of your life together. Something borrowed: Your mother's veil. Final touch: The conflicted emotions in your father's eyes as he lets you go.

It is the colour of the blanket in which you swaddle your newborn son, whose eyes are just like his father's. The colour of the spring hydrangeas and forget-me-nots as you all proudly return home. The colour of the summer day when he first learns to swim. It's the way the tips of his fingers look when he's been wrestling with his friends in the snow so long that the coldness seeped through his gloves. (Or, as little boys so often do, he decided to be the bravest one of all the boys and remove his gloves to make better snowballs.)

It's the first thing you notice about the first girl he ever brings home: the glittering, azure tincture of eye shadow on her eyelids, framing an unnerving stare. It's the sinking feeling you get when you first see this girl: "She will break his heart." The dampened aura that weighs down his shoulders and shadows him when she proves you right. The pain you feel for your son. The pain you share with him and help him withstand and recover from.

This colour appears in countless shades and emotions on his graduation day: It's a proud colour, peacock-like pride evident in the tears, the hugs, the photographs: "I'm so proud of you."

It's the triumphant colour of his Honor Society graduation stoll, but it's felt in washed-out tones amidst the reluctant goodbyes that are not only expressed directly toward friends and classmates, but internalized toward the good times shared and memories created in the last four years. This is the colour of goodbyes, the unmovable, steely colour of the end of one era in life. This colour is also the herald of a new beginning, a time of progression.

The phone rings one day and you can feel the monochromatic rainbow pour through the speaker, manifesting itself verbally in the childishly ecstatic manner of a grown boy in love: "She's amazing!"

It's the colour of truth, the truth you and your own blue-eyed soulmate feel in your son's promise: "I do."

In an optically transparent shade, this colour lingers precipitously on your lower eyelids. You remember your own realization and confession of the truth to the eyes of the man whose warm hand you're holding, the eyes you met whilst idly tapping your pen against your desk in a boring classroom.