I felt comfort in the colours of my palette. I couldn’t quite place my finger on what I liked so much about it, what I felt drawn to. Was it when I took my water brush and swept vermillion off her feet, intoxicating light orange swirls across the paper? Or was it when I layered pearlescent blue and dark indigo, mixing the colours so that they felt less lonely on the page?
I noticed it first in this palette. The separation of colours, in their own designated, picture perfect squares. This was followed by a walk in the park, my eyes drifting to the ceiling of trees, and noting the almost patchwork design that took away from the fullness of it all. I found later that this was ‘crown shyness’, an unspoken agreement, where the branches would keep to their own trunk, where the leaves did not press any further than their root.
Two candles sit side by side on my windowsill. Wax melts and pools around the wick, exhibiting a soft scent around the room. Part of me wants to place the wicks together, to see the larger flame. To see what happens when two non touching things, two forbidden things, become one. Instead, I watch the shadow of the flames dance on my wall. Though, sometimes if I’m sleepy, drunk, and dizzy, they become people, a partnered couple, amid smoke spirals in the air.
Their refusal to cross that boundary to connect the blanket of leaves, the refusal to tiptoe shamelessly across that line from one bold crimson to a timid saffron, refusals that left me wondering, am I too limiting myself from such boundaries in life? Two flames that create a burning wildfire of heat and passion, who am I to limit them to their singular abilities?
I test myself in the present, my eyes wandering to individual, lonely items, and I find my brain searching for possibilities; the mind whirs itself into phantasmagoria, as I sit with strange thoughts and new ideas, potential brimming in the back of my throat. And maybe if I speak it, say these things into existence, something will come true. A dream, a spark, a simple branch! I watch, and I listen, and I wonder when the next step will be taken, when the wrong fruit falls from the tree, when the sun shines instead of rain. A world of possibility at my fingertips, or in this case, the watery colours of my favourite palette.
