Color Theory

I’ve been thinking a lot about when I began to distrust everything and everyone in my life.

I remember being a very open child. I loved learning about other people because it gave me an excuse to talk. I guess I always remember liking attention. I liked being liked. I spent a lot of time alone, which feels strange considering I had three older siblings. My brothers had friends, my sister had friends, and I was happy to be by myself. I built a lot of worlds. I pretended places were things they weren’t. When I did spend time with my closest friends, I liked pretending we lived the same life. I loved when my friends’ parents liked me. I loved looking at their belongings as proof of another place I could live in.

I think that solitude protected me. I lived inside a bubble that softened comparison and delayed my own self doubt. When difficult feelings appeared, my mom helped me manage them, sometimes by talking them through. Sometimes I would try to work through new feelings myself, usually by replacing them with controlling routines that felt stabilizing until they didn’t.

At 24, distrust has become one of my most frequent emotions. Nothing feels true, sometimes, and actually pretty often, even the things I tell myself. I question my reactions as I’m having them. I replay conversations, and feel like I missed or invented something. Envy and jealousy are new for me, too. They feel sharp and hot and embarrassing. They are bright red. I think I’m late to them.

Every emotion I feel starts out very thick. Joy is the brightest color in the world. Hurt and distrust feel thick and dense and impossible to navigate. Usually if I stick with them by questioning them or looking at them with another point of view they start to thin out, like adding water to paint or milk to batter. They become translucent. I can see through them without them disappearing, and I feel better.

I miss the time when I felt none of this, but I think that absence made sadness kind of muddy and confusing instead of painless. I’m starting to notice that the most complete forms of happiness are mixtures of a lot of tones. I feel joy with fear. I experience love and vengeance all at once. I’ve started crying during sad movie scenes this year. Even now, writing this, tears are streaming down my face and there is genuinely nothing wrong.

I saw a Hasidic Jewish woman at the Brooklyn Public Library looking up red women’s clothes and baseball caps. A friend told me that at a certain age your eyebrows stop growing, so you shouldn’t pluck them too much. Your teeth shift, too. From the moment you’re born, they start to shift forward. When you are born, you begin to die.

My dad called me and told me he woke up seeing the shadow of a tree out of the corner of his left eye. He walked into every room of his house and the shadow followed him. It stayed after he rubbed his eyes, and after he washed them with water. His eye doctor gave him medicine, but the shadow will always be there. That’s just what it’s like to grow. You don’t see more clearly. You see more shadows. Feelings that used to be invisible become evergreen.

I asked my parents to rummage through papers I saved from when I was younger so I could make something out of them. My mom got upset about something I wrote in 8th grade. I think that’s when I was learning about anger. And on the train, I sat across from a homeless woman fixing her hair in the reflection of the window. She kept starting over. She got off in a hurry and left five or six sweaters on the seat and the floor. It was nine degrees outside. I wish I said something.

On my walk home, a man was howling the national anthem like a dog performing for the moon. He held the last note for four blocks.