Kati Davis Color

“There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why – when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation." - Kate Chopin, The Awakening

This passage makes me long for spring, for long walks through trees bursting with green and long naps among budding dandelions and long talks on sun-warmed shingles, for a time when I’ll know what job I’ll leave for in the morning and what apartment I’ll be coming home to at night. This passage also makes me dread more winter days to come, fat gray clouds hiding the sun and spitting down on me as I hurry through the streets to the class I’m late to that will probably bring down my GPA and then I won’t be eligible for that scholarship and then I’ll graduate broke and jobless, clutching a piece of paper that claims I can write children’s books and maybe make pretty things with computers. This passage brings to mind the color yellow: the color of sunshine and sunflowers and eggs sunny side up; the color they say no true artist likes because artists should be dark and melancholy and winterlike, full of blues and grays and blacks and maybe reds but never ever yellow. Well I say screw them because yellow is the color of light peeping through my bedroom blinds after a winter night wrapped in melancholy like blankets, and I would choose those bright lemony petals over suffocating grayness any day.