We Were Blue for a Limited Time Only
I couldn’t see the picture until I was further away. Kind of like how we couldn’t see blue until we had named it. Just because we aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean it’s not real. Just because it was real doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Just because it’s forever doesn’t mean it’s true.
I’d been thinking about, listening to, looking at shades of blue. A very particular electric shade of blue like a newly formed bruise, the sky just past twilight before it gets deep space dark. For a long time, I’d thought of this blue as an “end” like going to sleep at night. But when I left in 2017 and went on my very first trip on my own, dubbing it a temporary escape, a side quest, that blue started to bleed, sky into ocean, death into pulse.
And that ended up being the beginning of my story, or maybe not even that. A prelude. Everything was a mess, nothing the way I’d planned. The metrics I sought felt more and more like distant stars I no longer felt like catching. Why? As they say, the universe is always expanding and just the same, everything kept moving further and further away.
What a shocking thing it was for me to leave—easy to say now—popping the bubble on my former dreams. After a temporary disorienting shift of my identity I realized hey, I like this person and this life way more. She writes poetry and makes time for art. She goes to Paris by herself, sees and breathes and smells. She reads for pleasure, actually reads not just consume information to alchemize it into the potential for reward, and finally has time, the same time because she’s not magic just stardust, to be astounded and discomforted by ideas, like Plato’s theory that we are all shadows and nothing is real. In the midst of this personal and creative renaissance, artificial intelligence became real and pedestrian and all the pawns of our biggest machines were dubbed what we once reserved for the one and only. No one blinked, we all went with it. Cue the “Prove you’re not a robot” filters. Cue the failing at being human.
I was a child when a teacher first introduced me to the idea of metaphor. I treated it like a test, thought myself so smart to have found the answer. Then we all went around and I realized we all had different ideas like a Rorschach test. So where is the grass greenest? How do you know the sky is blue? Is blue sad or is it true? Whatever it is, it was here and we were here. Maybe meaning is just code for metaphor. Maybe poetry is just code for life. As Eminem rapped in the song, Love the Way You Lie: I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.
“We were blue for a limited time only” is a collection of 17 poems written over two years, about the last seven. The poems were written separately without any intent to include them as part of a narrative but eventually became part of one, both sequential and circular. The collection explores themes of perception, identity, and independence through a surreal landscape where everything blue is one day sooner than we think gone, a call to action to focus less on what’s in front of us.
I’d been thinking about, listening to, looking at shades of blue. A very particular electric shade of blue like a newly formed bruise, the sky just past twilight before it gets deep space dark. For a long time, I’d thought of this blue as an “end” like going to sleep at night. But when I left in 2017 and went on my very first trip on my own, dubbing it a temporary escape, a side quest, that blue started to bleed, sky into ocean, death into pulse.
And that ended up being the beginning of my story, or maybe not even that. A prelude. Everything was a mess, nothing the way I’d planned. The metrics I sought felt more and more like distant stars I no longer felt like catching. Why? As they say, the universe is always expanding and just the same, everything kept moving further and further away.
What a shocking thing it was for me to leave—easy to say now—popping the bubble on my former dreams. After a temporary disorienting shift of my identity I realized hey, I like this person and this life way more. She writes poetry and makes time for art. She goes to Paris by herself, sees and breathes and smells. She reads for pleasure, actually reads not just consume information to alchemize it into the potential for reward, and finally has time, the same time because she’s not magic just stardust, to be astounded and discomforted by ideas, like Plato’s theory that we are all shadows and nothing is real. In the midst of this personal and creative renaissance, artificial intelligence became real and pedestrian and all the pawns of our biggest machines were dubbed what we once reserved for the one and only. No one blinked, we all went with it. Cue the “Prove you’re not a robot” filters. Cue the failing at being human.
I was a child when a teacher first introduced me to the idea of metaphor. I treated it like a test, thought myself so smart to have found the answer. Then we all went around and I realized we all had different ideas like a Rorschach test. So where is the grass greenest? How do you know the sky is blue? Is blue sad or is it true? Whatever it is, it was here and we were here. Maybe meaning is just code for metaphor. Maybe poetry is just code for life. As Eminem rapped in the song, Love the Way You Lie: I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.
“We were blue for a limited time only” is a collection of 17 poems written over two years, about the last seven. The poems were written separately without any intent to include them as part of a narrative but eventually became part of one, both sequential and circular. The collection explores themes of perception, identity, and independence through a surreal landscape where everything blue is one day sooner than we think gone, a call to action to focus less on what’s in front of us.