Colors and Words

Today I wore blue. Blue cardigan, blue jeans. The sun shined yellow, but from my perspective sitting in my red car, behind my brown tinted aviators, the world looked like a beautiful sepia photograph.

Sometimes I think of periods of time in colors. Today is a warm green. Happy, full, beautiful. Yesterday was a lilac. Thoughtful, nostalgic, peaceful.

I think of these past few months. They have been a pallet of cool grey, deep blue and dirty white. I think of summers in Montana; the deep amber, bold yellow and hunter greens remind me of life and vibrance.

We live in colors, yet we don't think in words. All the time.

Today, a number of moments happened that left me forming sentences that I hoped would appear on this blog. I came to this discovery: my life is very much like the film Stranger Than Fiction. The most mundane or insignificant event will happen, cuing a voice that eloquently begins to write. The voice narrates my actions, describing the colors and the emotions. The voice is my own.

Almost five years ago I knew I wanted to be a writer when I would walk through campus writing everything I saw in my head. At first I thought I was crazy, then I realized I was merely passionate.

Today I sat on a bench at the courthouse waiting for the commissioner's meeting to reconvene for the public. I spoke with a man who is running for a county office. We discussed the upcoming profile I would be writing on the candidates, and joked about giving him a four-page spread.

This man then told me he was a patriot. He described a few experiences serving in the Air Force, and I thanked him for his service. He talked more about his country and his desire to serve wherever he is.

"You are a patriot through and through," I told him.

He paused. Looked at me slightly sadly, and ventured into his next story. He used jargon I didn't understand and named places I had studied years ago in dusty, musty smelling history books. But it wasn't a chapter in a 700 page text book to him, I realized. As he would speak about his experiences and the people he knew, now long gone, he would look past my face. He had left the courthouse on the corner of Main and Second East. He was halfway across the world. He was in a dusty village. He was on the rooftop evacuating his men. He was being beaten as what I assumed could only be a prisoner of war. Occasionally he would come back to that building in a small town in Idaho as a woman's shoes clicked across the marble floor.

I could never fully understand the experiences this man had. But that's not what his intent was. This man was a patriot, through and through. It was in his blood, his heart, his soul. The voice in my head began to write his story; in it, a new chapter would be written of how this devoted patriot had touch my life as well.

We live in color. We don't always think in words. But we thrive, we love, we influence in a little place called reality.