It Was Never Blue

“My favorite color is blue.”

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          “No. It’s purple! You told me it was purple?”

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          “No, it’s blue, how can you not know my favorite color?”

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          “You had told me it was purple! It couldn’t have changed, it was purple.”

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         It was a valid argument. You were a swimmer in your prime, a boy who wanted to be surrounded by water every chance you got. Splashing around on a sunny Floridian day, jumping in puddles after a long rain, or just swimming laps to clear your head. Your childhood had been built and framed in blue. You loved the idea of blue so much, you wrote your entire college essay on water. Yet, blue is the building block to something much grander than itself. Being alone all of your life, you thought you loved the color for its seriousness, depth, and gentle loneliness. Your love for the color blue is as believable as your mom not offering to make us brownies after sitting on the couch, starting our third movie. I respected this false thought and still do.

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          When it was over, I drove for hours, searching for everything blue. I drove from Tampa to St. Pete and back again every weekend for the first month, sitting on the beach and pacing up and down the shore wondering if you would have jumped in with me if you were there. I drove to Gainesville, Lakeland, Winter Haven; I looked wherever I could. I stalked around in search of blue with reckless abandon. I thought I’d found it in Gainesville in the eyes of a boy who only wanted one thing, then next in Lakeland around the lake we’d sat around to watch the sun. But like tapping on the back of a stranger who you thought looked like your friend from a distance, they turned around to be merely a shadow of you. I couldn’t tell you why it was so important to me to find the blue you claimed you loved so dearly, but I desperately wished that I could fill the space you’d left.

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          One day we sat in your ten-year-old Camry which could have probably traveled the globe a thousand times (Camrys truly are the most reliable thing the Earth has ever offered us), and you sat, head in my lap, sobbing. Before that we’d said the customary, we’ve been dating for an appropriate amount of time now “I love yous,” but that was the moment I truly knew I loved you. You cried for hours, head buried in my shoulder to hide your face and clutching me tighter than any piece of clothing I could have ever owned, upset and worried about how you couldn’t swim. You had an injury that kept you from the big blue. You couldn’t be around the blue I fought to cling to 12 months later, and it was driving you insane.

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          You might have been blue when I met you, but you certainly weren’t blue after, and you were never meant to be. Blue is the color of the sky before it’s painted purple.

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          After that long moment in the Camry, we did everything together in purple. There was no other way we could have done things. You thought your favorite color was blue, but you’d never know it truly had always been purple.

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          Purple was the color of every flower I’ve ever loved. The color of majesty, a holy hue the old world venerated as it wrapped the bodies of old white men. Purple was the color of my room at my grandmother’s house. It’s fascinating: purple is a color neither distinctly masculine nor feminine, but the mix of two bold primary colors fighting until they both had given in. Driving home in my gold Toyota, my shirt had a large wet spot from where the tears dropped down, and I knew you’d given in.

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          “When you get there, go inside.”

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          I never ever listened to you, so I sat in the driveway until you pulled up, swinging open the door to that beat-up car, the biggest bouquet of purple in hand. They always had some form of purple: sprigs of statice, fistfuls of pastel roses, and billowing mauve chrysanthemums sitting on the edge of my nightstand.

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         The day I realized no one would bring me perfectly purple flowers for no reason at all was the day I hurt the most. I woke up that morning fighting back the blue escaping my eyes, and pushed off my blanket to go to the store a block away. Clad in my pajamas and arms crossed, I stared at the floral fridge. Red, pink, orange, shades of cream and white filled my eyes as I skimmed over the flowers in front of me. Yellow roses trimmed and cut, sitting in a purple glass vase were all I could focus on, so in a hurry, I bought them, refusing to make eye contact with the cashier, who probably assumed I was a wonderful friend for buying flowers at 9 A.M.

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          “My favorite color is purple. You know, like the light purple after a long sunset when everything starts to mix together and the sun is completely down.”

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          That’s what you told me the first time we’d watched the sunset together, and I’d asked you what your favorite color was. You pointed to the sky, grin wider than the view as the blue clouds crashed into the red sun and painted everything in-between purple.