contrasts

So I received this envelope in Bremen. It was so beautiful. I unpacked all the contents, small pieces of paper, material (the colour of a 60’s kaftan), small paper fried-egg-like fragments, post-cards (with a person in a pineapple suit), a business card that was nothing like a business card. All teaching me about yellow. Colour.
It made me start looking, with my new camera, through the lens.
The instructions for the task were ‘Yellow or some other colour’ – now the instructions hang on my walls here, and the walls are pale pink, with swirls of grey genie-smoke nearby.
I started to look.
I started to take photos of colour. Just because it is nice to look at . Like a person, with a certain personality. Orange has a feeling, grey-teal-blue has a feeling, white fluorescent light on a tiled walls underground (all the same colour, with grouting in between), has a feeling. I have always like soft colours. I wear soft colours (even though the 80’s killed their reputation), I have faith that they do something different, and sometimes (just like chilli which I can’t eat) contrasts grab at me too much, and I want my colours to slide off one another, from one into the other, still with a distinct difference, but not a difference based on being opposite.

In New Zealand years ago, sitting on a wide hill after climbing up through navy forest, I spoke with my friend about beige, and wanting to wear beige, beige everything, and since it is not a colour really, but an approximation for a space that is still noticeable, beige will never be the same as itself. And so I dreamt of beige-blues worn against beige-cream stockings, and a bangle (like the one that recently got smashed on the floor, perfect stone ceramic hiding a washed aqua heart, I cried from this), and the beige-pink of skin without sun. Grey shoes probably, the colour of ash.
This never happened. I still spend my days in accidental contrasts and the un-wished-for violence of that. Of course, sometimes we need clashes. But if I admit my fantasy, it is far closer to the lines of gradation, than brashness.
So in my camera I gathered up colours. I felt like I failed the task set by EC. Since she said to take photos of one colour and to find four examples, and I made a real mess of it, and dabbled in lots of aversion, or just not doing it, like homework, not with a clear edge.
I felt bad about this, and I could have employed the word ‘procrastination’ like a little pin.

I didn’t know if I was doing the task, but now, looking backwards through those weeks, I did do something. Something was did. Helped by the letter, of which I was afraid, you know. Naturally. Because it was so beautiful, and I wasn’t sure if I could answer such beauty. It wouldn’t be the same, and being mine, I wouldn’t recognise what it was, or was like.
I will gather up the colour photos. All not quite answering the task, but answering as best they could, with their enthusiasm, at least. Diverted, however. Always diverted.
The last one I can remember was the garbage skip – in this city they are orange and there is an orange company with men dressed in orange, running into the courtyards of the old apartment blocks.
Orange is loud, but beautiful too. (We danced to Balkan beats at a sweaty party, stayed up late.)
The skirt that I thought was vinyl for sure, did turn out to have been once alive. I wear it now, it is silky on the inside and the washed colour of sky-milk. It misses its friend the delicate bangle who now lives a splintered identity on the window sill. Watching the green-green of the enormous tree there.
I know there must be contrasts. We simply must understand that they are only a thought.