LVP

I’m currently doing laundry. Folding the colour load, I think of my own colours. In this mundane, repetitive task my mind wanders across the spectrum. Which spectrum? Pick one.

Born out of a void and into whiteness

Like a blur of red the momentum of childhood

Bland, blanc innocent lasts as long as a thunderstorm

As grey teaches to listen and shut up and learn and absorb

Lest the flaming reds come to get you

Among all the t-shirts in the colours, few are mine; my partner has blues, reds, greens, yellows. She has grown up with a more refined palette. This is an unfortunate reflection of the gender binary and the lack of imagination within society.

Red red red red red

Hot and un-tempered and very tempered

From the passiveness of grey

To a masculine power drive

But if all you see is fire you’re bound to burn down

Now I’m hanging the black load. This is where the majority of my tees are. It a mix of pop culture, puns, and video game mashup designs. I even have metal shirts from when I was a teenager, the seeds of my colourless wardrobe.

Black is saying ‘black is my soul’

The ashes of a psyche are not reborn in dazzling red glory

But the soot is kept and mixed in and engulfed

A cloak of distance and a cowl of callousness

See all evil, be not evil, feel no evil, feel no more

As I put away some of the laundry, I think back to a white shirt I use to own; one with a pink moth on it (well, Mothra if you want to be specific). The kaiju’s design was hastily spray-painted to have them ready for Frosh Week, so the outlines of the giant insect mean nothing to the splatters of colour. I hung onto it forever, memories of an amazing experience that would lead to a quick, cold winter.

The night does not last forever

The sun will break and pass through the dew

Reflections of so many colours take flight

In new fields one can freely be red, yellow, green, orange

Mix with other colours and see what secondary, tertiary hues form

I put away the folded laundry and shove things into overflowing drawers. My shirt cubby is the worst with mementos from half of my life gathering moth (but not Mothra) holes. I suck in my gut while reminiscing. The ‘M’s and even ‘L’s have become uncomfortable to wear and uncomfortable to think about. Time makes you fill out. Time makes you feel wearied. Time makes you full of regrets. Time makes you recall yourself as the fool. These days I try to cram my head full of knowledge that disperses a lot of that shame and fatalism.

Lights that shine bright often fizzle and die

A disco ball refracting all of the spectrum will eventually fall

There will be reds and blues and whites

All amassed and firing off while those that fizzle return to ash

And while black draws in all, a red can come and corrupt from within

In one of the dresser drawers there is a box of condoms. They haven’t been touched in a year and are probably near their expiration date. It reminds me to check the condiments and spreads in the fridge to see if they’ve outlived their stay. I sigh and think of the domesticity that settles in as you get older. Then I roll my eyes and think of all the things that are unobtainable because I’m neither rich nor was I born in the 60s. Unfortunately, sexuality feels the same in my 30s. A fixed point, cemented in time.

Absence of all colour can be white or black

But can the possibility of non-colour exist?

A state through years can live on and extend to infinity

A blankness of blank where time continues but everything stays the same

A routine of stasis of nothingness, invisible to the human eye

My hair is a sandy brown (with white streaks). My eyes are brown. My copious amounts of body hair are black (now turning grey). The mirror shows a familiar and distant face. My beard is overgrown in light of the global tragedy, but contains the colours I once had as a child and ones I thought I would get in the future, during a rebellious phase that never came. But those reds and blondes are unifying like a mountaintop slowly being covered by snow. If I dyed my hair, what colour would it be? If I wore special contacts, would they be a natural colour? If I dyed my hair, who would I be? If I dyed, would the unwanted parts of my ‘I’ die as well?

Assigning colours to mental illness is not hard

It is done with different personality types

The darkest depressions in our brain create black voids

The panic of anxiety contains violent flashes of yellow and red

The colour wheel spinning endlessly echoes the everything-ness of ADHD

I walk back into the kitchen. A pile of dishes waits in the sink, the Sisyphean chore that will last until I breathe my last breath. The not-quite-Ikea drying rack sits by our large hutch/altar (not mine) and all the blacks wave a comfortable hello my way. A flash of colour lays nearby. One of my own shirts that I forgot to put away. It has bright tetromino shapes among a sarcastic caption that relates to staying inside before it was necessary for all of us. The base of the shirt is purple. Purple. The colour speaks to me. It’s only in the last few years that it has replaced my old standby, red. Funny, even something as permanent and seemingly inconsequential as a favourite colour can change.

Within the years of non-colour and inaction

Beyond the wounded colours of the mind

There were flashes of brilliant light

Nights of fireworks that ended too soon

Non-permanence of primaries and secondaries and tertiaries to hang on to

I chug from a 2L bottle of Cola. The familiar syrup and red gives me a small increase of dopamine. I still think on colours. How they can represent any abstract concept you can come up with yet they can be so insignificant when you float day to day. I still grapple with my colours, what I am inside. Purple is rising. It’s come to the front of the spectrum before, teasing me. Something I was ‘curious’ about in high school. Something that I could taste in my mouth a number of times. What does it mean to have these colours on the inside yet hide in pastels on the outside?

Colours come in different hues and different purities

Intensity can ramp up to neons

And plummet down to muted tones

Even in silence and the tiniest flicker there is beauty

The original rainbow was compared to a musical scale

Play the wheel and create a piece as beautiful as any symphony

I’m now at my computer, writing and researching frantically. Time is running out to get to the heart of who I am within the colour spectrum. Unscientific tests and readings lump me into different pools. I float in purple and it feels right. Many things match up. I can see my patterns in the royal shade. But colour, like anything, is not simple. It can be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, even beyond the perception of our own eyes. Purple turns into violet, indigo, lavender. At my desk, a flag waves in the artificial breeze of the fan. I think of the banners that represent all these unique identifiers, sexualities, orientations, genders. In those lines I fall, a chameleon within each one.

Within purple, violet, lavender and indigo there is so much importance

To the history of those sidelined and oppressed

By the monoliths that are blue and pink

The two are always paired together without any variation

But looking closer reveals the diversity intrinsic to all life

I look through flags on Wikipedia and through image searches. In the symbol that I seek meaning in, pink and blue exist, squeezing purple in between them. It seems like this odd colour out is being crushed. But the truth is in the small details: the purple bleeds into the bottom and top almost seamlessly. It’s such a minor detail but means so much to me. Something that can pass into both areas, something that can be invisible, squeezed out completely.

Lavender became the way to shame blue and blues

Streaks here and there which proceeded the purple hours

A Wilde ride that lead to a lavender scare and menace

Where violets were born of Sapphic poetry

And were used as code for love between pink and pink

I collect details, images, trivia all on the queerness of purple and its hues. Maybe the knowledge and research will allow me to understand my connection to these colourful notions. The cat littler stinks, bringing me back to rather dulled palette set found in real life. I scoop and think of my place in one community over another. In the Venn diagram, I’m a tiny smidge in the middle of many massive concepts. Purple is not on the rainbow flag, actually. It wasn’t even one of the original 8 colours. There was indigo that was linked to serenity and violet that was linked to spirit. Even on the common LGBT flag nowadays, purple isn’t there. It’s still violet. A similar fate befell the ‘Pluto of colours’. Indigo was stripped away from Newton’s original rainbow. There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’ or in ‘ROY G. BV’.

Colours and symbols can colour an entire life

But the complete existence may only be viewed in blacks and whites

The unexamined canvas is not worth painting

Sometimes there’s the most iridescent mixtures that make the soul soar

But many times there’s a blotch of contrasting hues that hurt to look upon

The midnight hour is approaching. When this ‘poem’ is due. The grand opus in my head it is not. The mind is the colour of that liquid you get when you paint a small picture as a hobby. Everything swirling around in a greyish storm. I still search for a meaningful comparison, an immaculate line between colour and sexuality. The truth is, life is messy. Sometimes you need to be a blue and then slip into a purple and hide the violet. I often feel like the forgotten indigo. I stay in the shadows and believe in all colours; I strive to support and protect any combination of layers on a palette surface.

I myself do not only gravitate to purple

but to other banners. Combinations of greys and blues or greys and yellows.

I seek the appropriate symbols as well. The infinity,

sideways ‘8’, sometimes centered in a heart. The Greek letter pi. A paw print.

There are many things that I could be. For now, I vacillate between

Purple and blue and the purples in between. I am

an indigo that only finds serenity through obscurity but

I strive to be a purple, be in the purple family, and fight to belong to the rainbow’s arch and the blue/pink’s line. I am a bisexual being searching for his inner radiance and pride.