“What’s your favorite color?”
I hesitated for a moment, nudging the loose playground rubble beneath my shoe. It had been some time since I’d been asked such a trivial yet meaningful question and it was reminiscent of another era. Seventh grade? Those were the types of questions one asked when getting to know someone. What's your favorite music? What shows do you like? What's your favorite color? Somehow that was much more personal.
“My favorite color in general? Or my favorite color to wear?”
“Either."
I imagined he was going somewhere with this, though I wasn't sure of the destination. “Well, my favorite color typically is purple but my favorite color to wear is red. I like how I feel dressed in red.”
I guess that said more than I would have liked. Red gave me permission to be something else. Something not so boring. Something not so bland. Red was fire. Red was passion. I could try it on and take it off and go back to hiding it within myself, cold and unmoved.
“My favorite colors are black, white, and grey," he said. "It’s symbolic of light, dark, and shadow, which we all have inside of us. For the most part it's been my life, devoid of warmth. Since we met you’ve added color to my world. You've added a whole palette to my life, filled it with red and purple. And I like it.”
I looked up at the sky, glittered with pearled fluorescence in the velvet night. It was the first clear evening we had since the hurricane and there I was, alone in the park after hours clutching a cell phone in the dark, hearing exactly what I needed to hear to cross over from my world to his, to risk everything. No one had ever spoken to me in that way and I was in awe. I could imagine us pressed together, his form in light and shadow and me painting him with my fingers and tongue in neon hues of pink, red, purple, gold. But I couldn't say all that. All I could muster in my tongue-tied lack of eloquence was, "That's fucking beautiful."
Photo Credit: Alex Rodriguez Santibanez