Walls

Walls

She likes it the moment she sees it at the Home Depot store. Because it glows vibrant—the perfect mixture of perfect yellow and perfect blue. Or so her nine-year-old self believes. It’s been painted onto a small card, labeled: Pastel Sage. She doesn’t know at the time that sage is a plant. She only knows that a sage is a wise person, and on the car ride home, she wonders why wisdom is green. At home, her mother holds up the card against the wall, giving a nod of assent, and the next week, the frigid white walls of her room thaw to a piquant freshness, albeit one with lingering paint fumes.

The next year, age ten, she sits in a chair in the middle of her room and stares, frustrated, at Pastel Sage, wishing it were Cream, or Soft Orange, some other hue that would conform more to the color of her furnishings. She doesn’t like that the walls are so like her. At school, she too sticks out, unusual and mismatching—different hopes, different ideas, different jokes, different understanding. The only student who wouldn’t be fed into the local middle school when graduation day came. She gets up and hides the walls with posters and drawings, and as she does, she clumsily drives thumbtacks into both the walls and her heart, because she finds playing pretend difficult at school. Other girls want to become princesses, singers, movie stars. Secretly she likes solving word problems for math and aspires to become a scientist.

Some years pass. Over this period of time, she realizes that Pastel Sage is actually four different colors:

Black, with soft green flecks. She sees this color for the first time the night before sixth grade. It’s past midnight and she still can’t sleep. She notices that the light from the lamps outside pokes through holes in the blinds, projecting small, green stars onto the ceiling. She’ll see this color every night from now on. It gives her hope for the future and the courage to dream on.

Cool green. She sees this color the next morning. It’s 6 AM, and her half-asleep stupor dissolves as the bluish tint makes everything almost unreal. Later, she also sees it on rainy days or on cold afternoons, and she likes it for the sense of creativity it gives her. Her room becomes a personal, magical cave, and when she’s down, she turns to it to get a hold of herself again.

Fluorescent, artificial green. She learns to avoid this color. She sees it after late nights awake, typing desperately at the computer. The walls look bright but shallow, washed out, like herself at her most difficult, stressful times, and the “eggshell” finish makes the whole place dull and unreflective. She drags herself through the day afterwards.

Warm green. Once she’s picked herself back up, this is her zesty color of strength, of grabbing the Now. She’s usually the most efficient, most concentrated when it’s like that. Like her walls, she becomes bold, enthusiastic. She sees more and more of it as she grows up, and she learns that it’ll always return, even after the most fluorescent of days.

Twelfth grade. She walks into her room one day and begins filling in the holes the thumbtacks left in her walls. She paints over the scratches, dark fingerprints, and dents. Finally, she begins sticking on a few of her favorite drawings and pictures from her life with poster gum. But one wall she leaves wide and blank. More time needs to pass before she can fill it. Because she sees that the walls she has been living with for years are a canvas—a background on which she expresses herself, her overarching thoughts and emotions. As she stands back to look at her work, warm green floods the room.