hues

Red. The color of passion. Red is often associated with love, a feeling so great it cannot be described. Love the science which could never truly be explained, as the poets say. Love is your chest feeling so full it’s on the verge of bursting. It is an anchor keeping you together in one piece, as if you would simply fracture if it weren’t there. Love is so precious, it needs to be cradled carefully. Despite its fragility it is still a burning passion, and passion encompasses anger. It includes rage, and power, and emotion. Red is the fiery pair of eyes that feel as if they’re burning your soul to smoke. Red is bloody ruins left behind after war. So destructive it leaves minds shattered for an eternity. But blood is also a need. It can be spilled but is ironically the very thing running through our veins keeping us alive. Beautiful and yet absolutely devastating.

Orange? Or is it amber? Apricot? The color is just as strange as its name. A name with no rhyming partner, unique just like the way the color is mixed from two others. Orange is creativity, it is freedom. It is the ability to express oneself. Orange is tangy, perhaps like the fruit it bears the name of. Tangy like tragicomic change. Tangy and yet somehow also sweet and sticky and smothering honey.

Yellow! The ever-joyous yellow. The bright leaping color that fills the sunshine, fills the daffodils, fills the chirping canaries. The color who is simply happy, simply grateful to be there. Yellow will brighten up the rainiest, most dreadful day. It shines in the gold hidden deep below, the gold waiting patiently to be found. The gold that can so easily lead to greed, if not watched carefully. But gold can also be good. Yellow is good. It is clarity, it is energy, it is a new beginning perhaps something like smiles or sunshine can buy.

Green; a color so versatile it almost seems like a paradox. Through good fortune as well as harmony and nature, green is fresh. For green is the color of the very earth we walk on, the money we so luxuriously use at our expense. But green is also the color of resentment. The color of jealousy, of betrayal, of revenge, resulting in phrases like “green envy”. Green is the old pain and trauma hidden underneath the surface. It is the core in fragments beneath the ice-cold exterior, it is an eternity of hatred. It is the villain in someone else’s story, but the victim of its own. Green survived its story. It is the very essence of survival. And from survival comes a different kind of venom breathtakingly unequaled.

Blue, the serene blue. The calm waters, the soft bubbling breeze, the vast sky. All soaked in a rich layer of the color blue. Nimble yet not weak, and so complex  you can practically see its depth and stability. As if you could peel away the layers of blue and see to the center of all your problems if you wanted to. Blue is the loyal friend who will never leave your side. Blue can be sad, blue can mourn. It is the tears streaming down the face of a torn lover, the waves that quench the thirst of so many lives. It can be tragic, it can comfort, all while sleeping peacefully.

Violet. Royal violet. Violet is a lavish gown, a bed of roses, a heavy crown. It is ambition, it is wisdom to the purest extent. Violet is mysterious, it is the dark magic bleeding from the villain’s point of view. The dark coursing magic, the kind that overwhelms you, swarms you, bruises you. It is the drive that creates pricked fingers, the voice behind the monstrous thoughts. It is the beasts that roam the night, both inside and out of the head. Violet is an unadulterated power. It is a ravishing and wicked grace. A force a fool would not even attempt to reckon with.

Ah, pink. The color of our dreams, no doubt. Although, is pink actually a color? Or is it just an imitation of red? Like how our dreams and hopes are our mind’s imitation of an idealistic reality? Pink is the softness we lost ourselves in during our childhood. A time of friendship, of affection, of all things rosy - another idealistic reality. If pink were a person she would never-not be blushing. People say “pink is the sweet side of red”, but really it is the color we created to wash over the intensity, glaze over the harshness of red. Glazed like a sweet donut, pink is perhaps a little too sweet. Sweet to the point of suffocating.