Indigo
By Kathryn R., Juneau, AK
ROYGBIV ... red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The rainbow - all the fascinating colors, colors like magenta. Magenta sounds like “majestic,” like a horse I rode once, when I was a little girl. I felt like royalty, sitting up there so high. All I could feel was the air around me, but I wasn’t scared. The horse was too majestic to let me fall. Magenta could be in the rainbow; it would fit in nicely just after indigo.
I believe that indigo is my favorite color. Of all those colors that I hear, I love the way “indigo” sounds the best. My mother once read me the names of every crayon in the box. So many! Nevertheless, indigo was still my favorite.
Enigma. That’s what indigo looks like. Like a veiled woman, with a dot between her eyes. Those dots, I imagine they are indigo.
Smooth silk, that’s what indigo would feel like: a dry river running through my hands. The sound doesn’t fit, though, no - a river sounds like violet. Violet, I’ve been told, is a soft color, but the word violet cannot be soft. Not the way “soft” is soft. Violet sounds like “violent,” how people describe Western movies - all gunshots and yelling. No, indigo sounds like a typewriter. Just the tapping, all by its lonesome.
Taste is the easiest to imagine. Purple, for example, tastes like the hot, juicy grape you find in a cinnamon roll; but indigo, indigo would have to taste clear and precise. Ice-cold water, that’s indigo. Not ice-cream cold, though; that’s too warm. Cold like the water in a lake that has frozen overnight, and you have to break through the ice in the morning to get at the water.
Smell ... smell is a tough one. I prefer to use the word “aroma” as it sounds more like the actual smell of a thing instead of the act of smelling it. The aroma of indigo is pizza dough rising on the counter, when you punch it down and let it rise up again.
This is what indigo is all about:
A veiled woman with a dot; a dry river made of silk. The tapping of a typewriter. An ice-cold lake; rising pizza dough.
That’s indigo.
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