You follow your kid dreams to Disneyland, not the closest one no that’s too pedestrian you’ve already been there twice. You travel to the other side of the world, try to find another way back to the best place on earth. When you get home, the difference is stark but the streets are just as flush pink, if you squint hard enough you could mistake one for the other. But one is a stunted child in beige uniform who may never grow up, you fear, the beige from the other is just the average colour of an entire universe. You wash out the white chocolate popcorn smell from your Peter Pan popcorn bucket so it doesn’t start to mould. In a few weeks you sniff it but you scrubbed it too well, all you can smell now are the jasmine flowers surprising you from the side.

Bright pulsing lights taken as a dance floor, sweat as endorphins. If there could’ve been a clearer sign for danger that would’ve been the best case scenario. A maze through a video game with solid warnings instead of hunches you can just shake off. Come to think of it, a sign the scale of a solar flare would suffice. What did it matter anyway? Two decades later you are having coffee with whipped cream on the patio having ignored almost every sign except the one that said go.

The ground is no longer wet from last night’s monsoon, and you wouldn’t know it was ever here, all the soaked concrete pat down dry, except that the grass is bright and quenched and alive. The best way to determine their peace is the lack of smell. They want to stay out of memory, just a sweep of green in the background of a milestoned life. But all you remember is when they die, and you take in the air like you take in the good wine. All that water for your feast.

There is something inside you humming in a colour too loud to ignore. Ideas to hatch and places to go. An endless buzz inside your mind, manifested into a vision board or many full of wants, wants, more wants. But the reality of the situation is that you were moving at a turtle’s pace and then made to feel okay about it. You thought this was it, this is you, and that’s fine. You've made it in the surviving-with-benefits sense. Then you were softened, shaken, astounded, and broken. You hitched ride after ride, carried one by one to the next stop not by a tech bro or guru, but by artists. One day, the train stopped and you peeled back the petals. Your name was on it, waiting for you to get on and steer, drive, fly, whatever you need to keep moving, because there is still something inside you humming, and now you know what it is. You asked for something to change, for some kind of momentum, a sign? You got it baby, now go.

Today, the shadows on your desk dance more suggestively than clouds. You've been watching them all afternoon trying to wrangle their way into this dimension. Outside, in this timeline, work days are ending and later, when rush hour is over, the only thing left to hear are birds chirping, the sound of a meadow dripping with sun for a few more good hours. Maybe you're no longer looking for eureka in the dark. Maybe the light has already reached you. Maybe it's okay if you don't know, it will try again tomorrow. It's the fastest thing in the world and it will keep trying to find a way to spend another moment with you. 

You’re thinking of the colour blue, but you live in black and beige and the closest thing you’ll get is the button-up shirt you thrifted because why would you spend money on something without a return on investment, you don’t even work in an office. Whoever invented the office shirt and made it this particular shade of cornflower, crisp and pressed and free of dirt and wrong ideas, deserves a raise. Blue is the rarest colour in quantity but one of the greats in area, which makes it efficient, a perfect metaphor for industrialist values. But blue comes and goes, and so do our values. Sometimes you think an office job doesn’t seem that bad, but freedom is a relentless stain on the mind you can’t wash out. A cubicle was once a castle and then a prison. You’re thinking of the colour blue.