The Color of Light

Outside, the color of your face is bright and shiny

and I know that it will be okay.

In the shadows, I can’t see the upside U forming on automaton,

as you press the button and we go down the elevator, the shadows crawling up and down your face,

rendering you concrete and tangerine, asphalt and red-light district,

as if something sinister is about to go down.

It’s time I learned the world is not monochromatic.

It’s time I learned there’s no such thing as good versus bad.

But who doesn’t want an answer

to what is the color of your love,

how deep is the scarlet in your cheeks,

popping out like a prize when you click a button,

like a pill-colored pink pellet from a Pez container,

the colors of my childhood

all lit up—

the red and yellow of a Tike bike,

the tie-dyed swell of bruised purples and deep-blue blues of the skin of a plum,

inside, mulchy filaments blushing, clinging to the perforated heart inside, juice dripping from our hands

as we use the wire claw to grab those grapey, gushy cheeks—

these memories, are they sprung from the bleeding colors of acetate

or from that gravity-defying thing

atop this thundering frame that gets me around?

The color of light

turns the brown of my father’s eyes yellow

Standing there, at the greatest heights, surrounded by blinding white snow

There, I was made to cross bumpy patches, steep elevations, all, of course, marked by that tiny Black Diamond.

The fear I felt

A baby, I was

Nothing to cry about, now

the colors of my childhood

bring back forgotten sights

and emotions

perhaps the first time felt,

like in my ‘teens:

the ever-changing ash grey of the ’94 caravan, its door opening to dialect-singing neighbors who turn to classmates who turn to lifelong friends; its door opening and closing 2, 3, 7, 10 years later, until—you, of my blood, at the driver’s seat, limbs in/middle seat out, the grey of the rising vapor matching the grey of the sliding door, rising out of that cracked-open tuxedo window, the grey that didn’t quite match the grey of the van on the cover of the album of the band of the song that you played the morning of the day that you walked away—

the day that I last saw you,

the grey door turning to the grey of emptiness and loss—

the grey of my late ‘teens rising into the grey of my early ‘ties,

the grey that matched your grey when I first met you,

you, flown in from 7,695 miles away, cracking open my Americanness,

the color of my privilege,

as a young Asian American girl—no, nothing to cry about, only words that, at the time, made me question who I was, in the eyes of others:

“What are you?”

“No, but, really, where are you from?”

“You don’t look like an American girl.”

“Imagine he’s Jackie Chan!”

No, nothing to cry about,

No, not life-taking, not scar-making, not walking-down-the-street-and-being-followed-for-no-reason-ing

or a slipper being thrown at me (at an ex-lover, bearded and brown, walking down the street).

The color of the skin of my grandmother gave her confinement in the middle-ground desert for three years of her teenaged life; that gave her mother wired walls in place of a neat green lawn; that gave my grandfather an ad-hoc chicken coop, interdit, within those wired walls.

Those thoughts that finally came, in my mid-‘ties,

showing me the color of my privilege,

along always with thoughts of the color of love

and the shape of the color of light

as it crowns your face,

the terror of the raw open red wound when a child

is now the terror of a raw open red wound of that thing in my chest,

the electric glow of light lighting up his face, and his face, and his face,

and that’s how I knew, because the only light lighting up your face is the one from within.

But now it’s not so simple as do you like

But how do you feel

Now it’s not so simple as what do you want

But what do you need

And now you can feel the electric chartreuse of the moment, awake and alive, the gelatin silver of melancholy memories, the subconscious grey pulse of sadness, sometimes covered over with chromatic spurts of anger, or more likely, indifference,

not the red blue yellow primary school days of cry-babying and refusing to wear purple corduroy pants,

or even the cadet blue, raw sienna, burnt sienna, tumbleweed, and periwinkle pencil colors of adolescence, screaming at your mom that you hated her, as she stands cooking your dinner, then scribbling those same red-hot fire words over and over in a furious high-tempo flame, how typical, no,

when the infinite rawness of red-hot anger and blue-fire fear of childhood and ‘teenhood turns to kaleidoscopic queries on the finite-ness of life,

the colors of adulthood blending into the other, spinning fractals reflecting off prismatic pinwheels, ricocheting into the cracks of one another, souls merging and painfully tearing apart, the colors that turn into blurry recollections with faces receding over time—

And then the day came that I had a Eureka! moment

That without colors, which brings life to ideas and concepts and personal experiences, we would not be able to see what others see—

We would not be able to feel what others feel,

So, no, let’s not erase these colors, even if they bring pain or fear, that fear can turn to courage and change—

So, no, let’s not turn a blind eye to the lovely colors of our skin,

And though color is measured, ellipsed, indexed—we can only see color in terms of light

So let’s see ourselves as in the light in the morning,

Because in the light our colors shine brighter