Gradation

This started as a free write during my freshman class. I was inspired by looking down at my burgundy nail polish. I've always loved the names that nail polish and crayon companies give to colors. Once my friend and I took a box of sixty four crayons and renamed them based on the first thing we thought when we saw them. I created a character who shared this interest. 

Gradation

Her nails looked black against notebook paper. But she knew they were a very dark red. Darker than blood. She relished looking at the names of the colors on the bottoms of nail polish bottles. She always searched for one that matched her present mood. The one she chose was named simply “wine”. It seemed to embody the heaviness she felt. She would have renamed it with countless other more fitting words to describe such layers of color.

Naming hues had always been her favorite pastime. In elementary school while her teacher blathered on at the front of the room, she would take out her box of sixty four crayons, organize them by shade and proceed to write down her own name for each one. She struggled to remember the conventional names that she learned in kindergarten. To her brown had always been “daddy’s beer bottle”. And purple in her mind would always be “Bruised”. But certain colors changed as she grew older, yellow was “dandelions” until rather abruptly it turned into “jaundice”. “Cloudy day” just as suddenly became “tombstone”.

            She had to leave extra time to arrive at any destination because she would always encounter a new color in her surroundings that she had to write down. She carried a small notebook filled with seemingly incoherent lists.  “Lemongrass, empty bed, pewter kettle, morning bus ride, I can still picture your face, trampled path”. She had more color journals than books on the shelves of her small apartment. She was only renting, so she was forbidden to paint the walls. But she had devised a way to bring brightness into her home. She took swaths of fabric, cutouts from magazines, paint swatches and pasted them on, till the blankness was completely masked by a collage of different tints.

            She worked as an office assistant in a sterile room. Her boss always wore a scratchy charcoal colored tie; his face was drained and pale. He was the only person she interacted with there, at most they exchanged incomplete sentences and single purposeful words. Her job was to write down messages, make copies and file endless stacks of paper. But she found solace in the fact that, while working, she had discovered hundreds of different shades of white.