Purple.

There are spasms of technicolor vomit disrupting my night sky behind me. Fireworks? Never could really understand that pyrotechnic quality inside their creators, never really could see what was beautiful about them.

The house could be empty. It’s dark already. The onset of evening has always made me strangely anxious, even though I like the transformations in the clouds, in the color. There’s that familiar quickening in my chest, the feeling of losing time, as if time were somehow connected to the day hours.

I like the way sunlight congeals and pools on the tile in my room, how it shivers and slants to slip past the glass of my window. I’ve never been much of a morning person and yet I like the tranquility of it, the day slowly unfurling, unfolding. Night is the reverse. It is upbeat, fast, too fast.

I don’t have a favorite color. It changes. Right now there’s a cramp in my neck and in my eyes, the artificial light from my lamp is curdling the shades of my room – everything is cast in a horrifying yellow, like the wrinkled skin of a corpse. The only sound is that of my father’s rumpled voice on the phone. I can tell he’s talking to a business partner. He’s taken on his professional persona. There isn’t a smile to be heard anywhere in his words.

My color right now is an unmistakable purple. Heliotrope. A non-spectral color, not to be confused with violet. I rarely have violet moments. Violet is hideous.

I wish I could still the ugly, electrifying charge in my insides. It usually comes with purple. It usually fills me with motion, gives me purpose. But today I cannot welcome it.

I am reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”. It is full of unhappy writing. My thoughts have been discolored by its gloom.

There are a good two hours before I can let myself go to bed.