There are things that cannot be mended, cannot be fixed, cannot be found. We try all the time to find the reason, call the name, find the cure. But sometimes it just does not exist. And all the brown paper and glue cannot make it right again.
We tumbled down that hill and our bruises are as real and yellow as canaries or sunflowers or daffodils. They are also the colour of chardonnay, the colour of perfume, the colour of a glass of Powers Gold Label.
Canaries sing down the mines, sing in their cages. Daffs and sunflowers spread their pollen like poison, etching misty fingers in an indelible path. But bruises will fade, pass away, leaving only a trace on the skin.
Jaundice will do its part too. And carrots, apparently. Even weak sunshine will leave its yellow shadow on some.
Yellow used to be such a pretty colour in our youth, but as we age it has become the colour of urine
When we are broken, we cannot dream any more. This can be called a state of yellow. The yellow belly of defeat.
And how do we mend? This is also the colour of yellow. The bright sunshine streaming in through the window. The first creep of yellow in the field in spring to the burnished yellow of the ripe rapeseed crop. Blinding yellow as we drive through the countryside, fastened on all sides with luminous crops.
Filaments of yellow hang in the light bulb. Suspended above our head, or gently waving in a summer’s evening, above and warming while we swing on the porch. We barely notice it, but it’s there all the while.
Yellow is also the colour of melting butter on toast. Especially the first toast after childbirth: the first most delicious of all foods to the new parent. Each time is better than the last, each expectation better than the first. Oh, the mother of six children must love that toast and butter, better and better.
At the end of the day, colours are what we think of them. They cannot exist alone. But we indulge and instill our emotions so they take on our hue, cast and colour. I am a yellow person. Not for some imagined weakness on my part, on their part, but for the possibility. The possibility that I might glow in the dark, mellow in the yellow, burnish in the afternoon.
I may be broken, unfixed and lost. But I still may yet burn with a yellow glow, pour through a window with intensity or feast upon a new day with gleaming eyes. I may be yellow but I have hope. I have hope, canary hope.
© Jillian Godsil 2012
If I were a Teegnae Mutant Ninja Turtle, now I’d say “Kowabunga, dude!”
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