Blu

When I see blue, what do you see? Do you see the same blue I do?

I think of sky first, then ocean. Funny thing they're blue for completely different reasons. The sky bends the light. The ocean swallows it. But standing here, looking up and then out, they hand me the same color anyway. Maybe that's the trick reality plays on us. We see the same thing and assume the same cause.

They say blue is calm. Peaceful. Sad too "feeling blue." I've never understood that part. Blue doesn't feel sad to me. Gray does. Gray is rain, and clouds, and that in-between hour where nothing's decided what it wants to be yet. Though I like rain, so even that doesn't hold up. There's something about walking in it, not the freezing kind, I'm not that cool, just regular rain. Everything smells different after. It's the thing that makes the world green. Rain gets blamed for a mood it doesn't deserve.

Anyway. Blue.

The darkest blues are the interesting ones, the kind everyone else calls black. Midnight blue is my favorite especially the night sky. It isn't really black up there. There are stars, and light everywhere, and sometimes a blue haze around the moon. If the light's still there, maybe black was never the right word. Maybe it's just blue pushed as far as blue can go.

Ice blue is a different animal. Sharp. Electric. Azure. Not angry, exactly…fierce. Clean in a way that starts to feel dangerous. That's the blue that gets me thinking about the ocean.

Except lately, when I picture the ocean, I don't mean water.

I keep picturing time the same way as this vast blue-green swirl, and we're not floating above it or sunk beneath it. We're in it, right on the surface, like a thin skin stretched between two enormous unknowns. Above us is everything that hasn't happened yet. Below us is everything that already has. And the surface we're standing on, that razor-thin now is the only part we ever actually get to touch.

Maybe the past isn't a place underneath us so much as a shape the surface already passed through. The future isn't waiting up there for us, it's just every shape the surface hasn't taken yet. We're not moving through time. Time is closer to a color changing, wave by wave, and we're standing right where the change happens.

It makes me think about how much everything gives itself away to become something else. A star burns itself down, and that light ends up warming a planet, growing a plant, feeding an animal, building a brain that looks up one night and wonders where the light came from. Nothing gained anything, really. It just got passed along, and somewhere in the passing, something new showed up that wasn't there before.

Maybe that's what living things do, in our small way. We take in a little light, a little warmth, a little attention, and we hold it just long enough to turn it into something like a thought, a garden, a person who loves someone else, before we let it go again. Maybe that's what love even is, underneath all of it. Giving away a piece of yourself so something bigger than either of you gets to exist for a while.

And somehow all of that started with a color.

Sky above, ocean below, and all of us standing on the thin blue line between them, looking at the same shade, made by completely different things and just assuming, the whole time, that we're seeing the same thing at all.

Maybe reality does that to us more often than we know.