The Color Palette of A Reverie
As I woke up today, shades of grey loomed over me from beneath the pallid sky. I open my eyes, dull charcoal irises in pits of splattered red, like an extinguishing wood-fire. Muddled with bluesy streaks in my soul, I get to the space between the blinds and lock out the morn’s cry. The day, vague, dark, dreary, in the color scheme of monotone, isn’t much of one, more of a haze.
I go back to bed; my love gives me my day’s offerings, a sunny golden kiss before stepping out for his mundane conquests. I ask the turquoise horse in my bedside lamp for a ride to my mercurial date with six am sleep.
A deep coral vision ensues and I’m flying between wake and sleep, in clean air with the crystal falcon of my dreams abreast. It takes me floating to a field drenched in light pastel blooms, lilac raindrops glistening among green glades of grass.
I glide alongside my lover, who pulls out my favourite patch of blue-green-yellow from the rainbow and swipes it across my floaty dress. We stop — catching a glimpse of the murky past, a lingering black caress of a phantom oh-so-vile. I shut my eyes tight as we close in on the castle of our dreams, surrounded by violet hills speckled with mountain watercress.
We land next to a silver round fountain with a woman’s statue in the middle, her face breathing everlasting life. In this magical haunt, we pluck ripe oranges out of trees and make juice, fresh and oozing with the rays of the sun.
My cheeks flush hot pink in the sultry heat; you touch them lightly with your hands turned amber with scraping the earth for shiny jewels.
In the midst of lush grass, tucked between two sombre trees, I find a hammock, all of frail ivory strings homespun. Back and forth we sway, with our legs and arms tangled; a butterfly hovers over and I see all the way through it in its raging, unmixed colours.
With a start, I wake up to the mellow orange of a fading twilight, sounds of pink jazz in the horizon.
Blinking — once, twice, moving slowly out of bed, I crawl out of the multi-hued carousel overhead.
Reluctantly, I find my way out of this enchanting jade forest, from the forever of my dreams, to present day oblivion. In this neverland between yesterday and tomorrow, between you leaving my bed and rolling back into it with true red roses, I live, I breathe — unravelling the trembling colour palette of a reverie.
Notes: This is a decade-old piece of writing that I revived from the journal. I wrote it back in the days when we had moved to a new city — a single couple. I was somewhere in between job-hunting and also enjoying the new-found luxury of time. It was inspired by one of those days when the monsoon gloom had become a little overwhelming and I felt desperately in need of color :).
Thank you for reading!
