1. Is it your dreams or nightmares that are your guide?
"Apparently misinformed about the rumored stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired, I was told look for blue."
“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
When skies look as blue as the peppermint candy I love to hate, they seem to whisper a longing - as if they’re waiting for their blue to be licked off. I know exactly what I’d do - stick my tongue out, one long swoop of the tongue across the icy blue and off the blue should go.
Here’s the thing though as much as I want to lick, swoop, swallow the sky: I thoroughly dislike the color blue.
It fills with me so much distaste that it makes my eyes well up and soon the ickiness of the blue even makes the tears prick. Blue is death and rigor mortis and the heart-shaped vein on my chest. Blue is the lady in the cigarette smoke on the heavily guarded Thursday night.
Turquoise and Aquamarine(I can't tell the difference) is charming, but charm is not something that can be inherited or passed on to the rest of the Blue family. I can make peace with the Teal of upholstery, woollens and carpets and curtains in old women’s houses and leatherette seats in diners that you only visit in a town outside of nowhere, when you’re going nowhere.
Azure is for the Indian Ocean where the tortoises walk and the palm trees shade; Azure is the Arabian Sea and the dhows and the ocean mist outside my bedroom window in an age gone by. It’s the clash of cults and cultures, just like Majorelle Blue that rocks the Casbah. Almost like a liminal space where midnight blue meets Sunset Boulevard.
Kingfisher blue once flew by when we were kayaking on the slow-slow rapids of Emerald Bay. It’s also the day when chicken satay red was licked off the fingers and memories measured out in pitchers. Indigo is ink spilled when no one talks about the one thing we should be talking about. It’s overshadowed by blue even in the rainbow. But sometimes I think Indigo is Blueberries like Blueberries are indigo. Blueberry nights, now I can be partial to that.
Prussian Blue reminds me of the Second World War and who would think King of Prussia is in Pennsylvania. It sounds like a Blue state but it could be Red and White striped too. Cobalt is the chemistry lab assistant’s voice screaming, what salt gives you that colour? Cobalt blue is nothing without its sweet companion canary yellow. Canaries and coal mines we will leave for later. Cornflower blue is Laura Ashley's catalogues of cowslip yellow wallpapers with baby blue trimming and cornflower blue flowers and mint green leaves. A salad…on the wall.
Sweet Carolina Blue is the sunshine on the people in the shirts on the clothesline. St Patrick’s blue is the drunken stupor bile of the green beer on the night he met her. Persian is mosaic on mosques in Uzbekistan, evil eyes on the Turkish merchants. Navy is sailors and balls I never attended and hickeys the young lads left on lasses they’ll never see again. Baby blue is for cribs of babes with diddly-doos and Ceil is the matron in the labor ward.
But blue? Blue is all the shades of my technicolor nightmares.
Like this one, from last night.
Where I was wearing a hideous blue dress and being ‘kidnapped’ to celebrate the engagement. Mine. I was pushing and shoving and screaming and crying. Inside a van that looked like the Volkswagen Transporter's third world cousin. Ten times removed. Then right there in the middle of the fuss in my nightmare I remembered I had loved the man but the thought of marrying the man felt like such an oddity, something was amiss. Wrong, even. Why did I agree to marry the man, Why did I not want to marry the man?
Cold Feet. Blue. He could wait at the altar till this nightmare was recycled in someone else's head, someone else's life. Striking blue.
Or that evening last week.
I was walking through a building with my mother and we came upon a woman with flowing blue hair, asleep on a low cupboard, cradling a broomstick and surrounded by flames. I tried to rouse her but she wouldn't wake. There was no one around. When she finally woke up, the flames had licked her hair and nicked her shoulder and neck. Mottled skin where the fire had danced.
That was my wake-up call too, that Blue Moon that night.
What you love can destroy you.
Joy- Prussian Blue and WW2 isn't something I think about everyday. So this is a welcomed change.