What's Your Favorite Color?

When I was younger, my favorite color was yellow. Everything had to be yellow. My mother called me her ‘sunshine girl’ and painted my room a brilliant shade, and I loved it. My mother’s favorite color was always blue when I was younger.

I was never really a pink girl. I wore no bows, had no sweet pink lace plaited in my hair. In fact, I loudly voiced my distaste of those prissy pink people all dressed up in, well, dresses and ribbons and other such ‘nonsense.’

Of course, a lot of that had to do with envy I’m sure. I couldn’t be a pink girl, as I wore my brother’s hand me downs so often. In fact, I didn’t like pink for the longest time, until college. Then I bought a pair of pink sneakers. I wore them across the stage at graduation. I guess someone commented that it didn’t seem dignified, me wearing pink sneakers at the commencement ceremony. But it signified that I finally accepted my femininity (point 1) and the day before, Xiamora and I had gone to the zoo. While there, I tripped and fell and got a nice ride in a golf cart by the security personnel to the nurse’s station. There, I spoke with the nurse as she talked about being profiled in some trade magazine and how they have a venom repository and anti-venom is air-lifted from them to all over the world when people are bit by snakes. She bandaged up my ankle (which had been badly twisted) and told me to stay off of it and to stay in sneakers for a while with it bandaged. She then wrapped it in an Ace bandage with some ice and sent me of on my way (point 2). So there was no way I was going to wear heals, and it was lucky I had the pink sneakers.

I do like pink now, but it’s not my favorite color. I went through the black phase. Everything had to be black, and I wanted my room painted black. Not that that happened. Black, the color of darkness, the color of despair, the color that isn’t even a color, just like I wasn’t a person, wasn’t a girl. Black absorbs all other colors but has none of their own, just like I absorbed all that was going around but did nothing myself, was nothing myself. I was just there to be the sponge to the hatred around me.

Blackness. I still appreciate it, but for different reasons. I like the dark, I was never afraid of it, I actually felt safer there where I couldn’t be found, where other’s would stumble I could move with sure movements. Blackness was very inviting, even the inhabitants of the darkness – those hiding from a world they either want to destroy or that wants to destroy them. I acknowledged it, embraced it, and when given the chance moved on.

Red is my favorite color now. At first, my mother said it was anger. She hated red, said it was all my ire, my hatred for the world. But she was wrong. It is a vibrant color, and that of fire, of the phoenix. From the ashes of fire rises the phoenix, new and reborn, in brilliance and splendor. Fire is a cleanser, and has been throughout history.

I find it interesting that as my favorite color changed to red (as it still is) my mother’s changed from blue to purple. Sure, she tried to say why my color was wrong, and yet she adopted it, blending it with her own once favorite, to become purple.

Fire is life, it is brilliant, and has no anger, it just is. And that’s what I’m going for – life, as is, no questions asked. To just be.

I do so love red. What’s your favorite color?