"Describe them, please?"
I look over at her, surprised. "What?"
"Describe the colors. We've been best friends since before I can remember, you know I've never gotten the chance to properly see them. Please, do it for me."
I hesitate. "...Where should I begin?"
"Anywhere. Everywhere. It really doesn't matter."
I take a deep breath. "Colors are sort of an abstract thing, I'm not sure if I'll be able to do it justice. But...I'll try."
She smiles. "What about yellow? I've always wanted to know about yellow."
"Yellow is...us hanging out, and laughing at jokes, and happiness in general. It's...the warmth of coming into your house after we've been out in the snow in winter. And in summer, it's the sun kissing your skin before it's actually considered sunburn." I laugh. "I'm sorry, this is stupid."
She shakes her head. "No, no, I understand. I get it. Can you try blue?"
"Blue is cool, but not necessarily cold. It's used for sad, but it's also the color of the sky when the clouds are somewhere else. Blue is complicated. I...well, it's complicated! It's what people see as pretty but it's also sad, and overall it should just be the color of confusion, in my opinion."
"Wh-what's red?" she asks.
"Red is burning heat. It's love, and anger, and passion in general. It's when someone is so mad they have to scream, and when they want to jump for joy when their crush likes them back. It's the color of blood, passion burning in our veins. It's incidentally also what you looked like that one time you forgot to put on sunscreen when we went to the beach."
She hits me, and we laugh. "The other colors in between, the secondary ones to use the art class term, are blends of those three. Orange is a cross between red and yellow, often seen as a sort of earthy color, and used a lot around Halloween. It's pretty close to brown, but it's still its own color. It's the gentle happiness and warmth of yellow calming the passion and anger of red. Purple is seen as royal, the calm, coolness of blue clashing into the strong heat of red, like how when magma comes out of the ocean trenches and cools into rock once it touches the water, in science class. It's calm, but also strong, level-headed but still able to rise up and fight."
She waits. I let her, and giggle a bit when she gets impatient. "What?"
"What about green?! Your favorite color, you can't leave green out!"
"Green is happiness and sadness joining together and neutralizing each other. It's complete calm and stillness, and it's the color of plants, so it's used a lot for growth. It's the smell after a rain, and the chirping and chittering of birds in the forest. When it has more yellow, it can invoke energy, and when it has more blue, it's the most calming color in the world. The entire spectrum of mixes in green shouldn't just have one title, but they do, and that's why it's my favorite color."
She smiles. "Brown is...a mix of all of them, right? Just sort of muddled?"
"Yeah. It's muddled, and the color of the soil. It's red and blue and yellow all at once, and most people don't like it, but it's beautiful in its own light."
"White is what I see all the time."
"It's all the colors at once, nothing is getting absorbed by it. It's used for purity, and newness, and innocence. It makes all the other colors lighter, closer to white, when it's mixed. Black is the exact opposite. It absorbs everything, nothing can escape it. It's used for evil, and darkness, and corruptness. And grey is a combination of both. Not pure, but not corrupt. When people use the term 'shades of grey' it means there isn't a simple right and wrong answer."
"It's a combination of both sides, good and bad, white and black."
"Yeah," I say, smiling. "You got it."
She smiles and pulls me into a hug. "Thank you so, so much."
She's crying into my shirt, but I can tell that it's yellow crying, not blue crying. "You're welcome," is all I can manage to say.
ns 15.158.61.5da2
