I came to the cabin to get away from it all. My mother painted the walls the color of the soft butter stick in the middle of the Easter brunch table when I was fourteen and didn’t ask anyone else’s opinion on the matter. She went to sleep every night for weeks with the butter yellow paint caked under her grown out and never painted nails. I woke up this morning with a pain in my spine. It reminded me of her aching back, that caused her to wince in pain anytime she saw the color yellow for months after the walls were coated with the hue she now despised. Yellow was no longer a happy color for her.
Birthdays and Christmases, sticky summer nights and crystallized ice-covered mornings surpassed me among those yellow walls, drowned in their supposed happiness so I didn’t have to feel any at all. That’s what she did, isn’t it? The yellow all finally drained away, because so much of it resided here, among these walls. I didn’t think sadness could bloom and grow the way the blueness grew within me, like a lily opening its petals wide to welcome in the spring sun to its most vulnerable parts. Like I did with you. But you are not the sun, you are the ocean, and the stars and the heavens clouded above.
After I’d slain the blue weeding every part of me that should’ve bloomed another color, I went to Home Depot at eleven in the morning and bought three cans of paint. Petal Pink, Honeydew Green, and Butter Yellow. I slathered the paint on every wall with carelessness as you smeared petal pink down my left arm and butter yellow across my forehead. And when you asked why I was painting over the yellow that was already so perfectly placed on the wall, I responded, “this is my butter yellow”.
My butter yellow is the sweet pastries that the butter on the Easter brunch table is spread onto and Tuesday mornings filled with more sunlight than the Earth can hold and lily's petals opening themselves to the sun beautifully and weeding out my blue from my garden which blooms in every color imaginable and my mother before she met her butter yellow and you.
