Changing Favorites

If you’d would’ve asked me, what my favorite color was, for most of my life I’d blue.

I’d dance around the word like I had meant seashores and lakes. Sport caps with favorite teams, drinking lemonade on top daddy’s shoulders, under the vast and equally blue skies.

I’d even fooled myself the occasional times I reached for the blue pen over the red. The shirt or that. Dare I dream of more?

No, I’d return to the familiar. I’d return to the blue that cold embrace felt like home.

That blue that upon first glance was black as storm clouds. The black like pen ink leaking down your shirt, forever ruined.

The blackest blue that looms and grows demanding surrender, spilling around, staining everything it touches. That blackest blue that grips your bones, freezing cold.

What first felt like isolation, dispair, holding you so tight that you, left standing there, gasp up, gasping and gasping, inhale

But....

but your lungs don’t pace, they too gave in to the cold. The darkness. The encompassing blue.

You sink your breath and what once was cold and unknown is now your home.

A home, dimly lit and freezing, with a grasp so tight you see no other light. A loner rafted at sea. You sit frozen as time moves the colors around visible but out of reach, moving..

but blue, no blue you stayed, and comforted me through the nights, the crys for help and pleads with the sky that I may one day feel the warmth of the other colors.

Blue listened intently only to fade to the familiar black that left you in an inescapable paralysis, left at the mercy of clouded thoughts.

But outside hospitals walls, while still blue something changed, a fire, a will to change, a yellow light like a lighthouse emitting from my chested. Hope, a rise to change from within that beacon light, navigating the frozen seas to change. A stirring light in the distant, green, a promise land, a vision of prosperity and happiness. A life green and lush and boisterous waiting in fertile grounds. An indigenous spirit back at home.

A life felt in movement.