A thoroughly white mood, if you ask me, though you will not (a scorned question among others I will not hear from you. A pity, because for once I know the answers). White is complex, but only when seen a certain way. Wearisome, I understand, but that’s perspective for you. Not there, there, not there, there.

You are not the first person to wish I’d stop talking in riddles. Bear with me? I know no other language. I have to spit the words out first, listen to them afterwards. It is only then that I realize how ridiculous I sound, how mystified I must make you (and my mother, my father, my brother, my neighbors, my teachers, my classmates, the people I share elevators with).

But it’s  for the best, now that I can look back objectively as objectively as possible. You should know what you’re getting into, shouldn’t you?

Why does white make me lyrical, painfully so? I try to say things the way they are, to avoid firework adjectives, to keep the edge on words. Mother likes to say I’ve inherited my father’s insensitivity. It does not matter to me – I prefer this to other possible personality faults. Someone has to do it, after all. Someone has to say what no one else will.

I’m not trying to glorify it, this detachment, this unconcern (or douchebagness, as Alex so aptly puts it). There comes a point, I’m certain, when insensitivity becomes cruelty, but I am unsure as to where that boundary lies (or even if I care enough to be conscious of it). The thing is, I do not know myself, not really. I’ve lived fifteen years, but I can only recall half of them. I am an ongoing experiment, a trial where I am defendant, judge, jury and executioner.

When white is refracted in a prism, it reveals its underbelly of color components. White is a conflict. White is something different, something that stays the same. Do I have to continue with these comparisons? I know I don’t, but I can never be fully sure of your reactions. It makes me nervous, seasick, awaiting the swish and switch of the features in your face, moving together in sync with the quicksilver of your thoughts, becoming something I will love, or something I will hate.

My neighbor will be hanging his suits and ties on the communal apartment clothes line outside. I think the shuffle of slippery feet on linoleum and the rumble of elderly washing machines will be the only symphony that will ever fully mean Spain to me. Even more so than the push-pull rhythm of the sea? Yes, yes, yes.

Last night I watched a moth attempt to commit suicide in the greasy kitchen lights. I shut them off, but was left with the certainty that the crepuscular insect would find death without my intervention. This morning I walked through the house barefoot, expecting to see an electrocuted corpse under the refrigerator, beneath a table. There was nothing, but I can’t shake the thought that somewhere – wings folded, shedding dusty scales, charred eyes – is the body of a creature I was the last person to see alive.

Mother is still asleep. We were both awake at two o’clock last night, talking in whispers through paper-thin walls. I had a towel under my highlighted hair and she spoke with the tired but comfortable tone of one accustomed to be continually evading sleep. I am usually too annoyed at my somniphobia to mention anything worth remembering, but frequently during the hours of daylight I will suddenly recall a snippet of one of her sentences, something garbled, spoken in English and quick silver Spanish. 

My room is a mess. There are orange and yellow ballons stranded on the floor, paintings left askew, dirty clothes stuffed rather unceremoniously in my closet. I’ll have to fix it before Mother wakes up, but for now I will wander into the linoleum kitchen and finish off Alex’s cereal. There’s something sleepy-looking to the sky today, as if it too has yet to wake up (or is choosing to delay the moment as long as possible). In this respect at least, we are one and the same.

I have a particular fondness for yellow. Maybe it has something to do with sulphur, or manipura, the third primary chakra. I have become accustomed to wrapping an arm across my navel, where this solar plexus chakra is located, in periods of wretchedness. Why I do this is like the reason behind my vehement, gelatinous nature and my dark dark dark eyes – unknown.

I have yet to meet a person whose favorite color is yellow. Is it yours? By all means, tell me. 

Maybe people are defined by the colors they prefer (not the ones they write down on personality tests – those are all so repetitive, but the ones that make them smile, that spark warmth in the pits of their bellies). What would a purple boy be like? Stubborn, traditional, tumultuous, standing up to dance, yelling across a room? And a yellow one? Vivacious, ebullient, reveling in adoration, but falling asleep thinking of insecurities?

I feel like turning on the radio, snapping my fingers to the 80′s progressive rock that’s on this time of day (Friday it was Carry On Wayward Son, and I blasted the sound through my bedroom window). 

I have decided on a new plot for the book I will not write. The main character’s name is Sebastian. At night, he is roused by rocks thrown at his window, appeals to play his violin at midnight funerals. He picks up his instrument and crawls down the three-hundred-year-old five-leaved ivy cemented to his house (which he has kept, despite his neighbor’s complaints. He feels a certain affinity with the plant). The first few times he was asked to do this he took the time to put on his one suit before, but now he arrives in orange-striped pajamas. Why would the dead care what he was wearing, anyway?

Slate gray? No, more like Payne’s gray – blended with ultramarine and sienna. A shade, supposedly, not a color, and so I sympathize with it, in the way only a girl can sympathize with a visual perceptual property corresponding to the spectrum of light.

I quietly stretch my arms and legs in class, limbs reacting to the tension under my skin. My shadow on the wall is a small, jangly conglomeration of charged, shaking, bored human extremities and crisp, curly hair that is just clean enough to be acceptable to society’s preconceived notions. 

When I get home I splash water on my eyes, peel socks off my toes with their haggard nails. I lean back on my chair, hands hanging off the sides, fully relishing the noise the sofa makes as Alex jumps on it, the thunk of the door as my mother comes in, the roaring of motorcycles outside my window (quite possibly the best thing about the house, that window).

I think of that time, back in elementary school, when I stole your ballpoint pen just so you’d have to ask me for mine. Later, when you were turned the other way, I dropped it back in your bag, watched you sling it over your shoulder and slip past the corner. Somehow, I found a mellow, strange kind of pleasure in knowing something you would never have reason to, in how you walked away, snapping your fingers, tucking your hair behind your ear, completely unaware that something you had been searching for had been returned to you.

I think the conductor of my train of thought is a short, pot-bellied, wild-eyed middle-aged man with corduroy trousers and an apron borrowed from the butcher who directs the chopping, disecting and poking through of my innermost ideas. On the hem: small fingerprints of blood.

My father is washing dishes, while my mother eats. Their voices are a constant reverberation, a hum that buzzes, snaps. He is sharp, but distant, and she sugar coats sentences with bitter sweet sarcasm I am unsure if I’m supposed to laugh or cry at.

I feel like I’m halfway between cordovan and rust. Brown is kind of an ambivalent mood, several different shades of yellow, orange and red, warm, fragrant, sour. I hardly know what to make of it.

It’s like I’m asking questions, and getting them back, post marked return to sender. When I look at the window, expecting a stretch of slow, vulnerable sky, I’m met with a painful darkness that only offers me my own reflection – a petty gift of condolences.

The house could be empty. It’s dark already. The onset of evening has always made me strangely anxious, even though I like the transformations in the clouds, in the color. There’s that familiar quickening in my chest, the feeling of losing time, as if time were somehow connected to the day hours.

I like the way sunlight congeals and pools on the tile in my room, how it shivers and slants to slip past the glass of my window. I’ve never been much of a morning person and yet I like the tranquility of it, the day slowly unfurling, unfolding. Night is the reverse. It is upbeat, fast, too fast.

I don’t have a favorite color. It changes. Right now there’s a cramp in my neck and in my eyes, the artificial light from my lamp is curdling the shades of my room – everything is cast in a horrifying yellow, like the wrinkled skin of a corpse. The only sound is that of my father’s rumpled voice on the phone. I can tell he’s talking to a business partner. He’s taken on his professional persona. There isn’t a smile to be heard anywhere in his words.

My color right now is an unmistakable purple. Heliotrope. A non-spectral color, not to be confused with violet. I rarely have violet moments. Violet is hideous.

I wish I could still the ugly, electrifying charge in my insides. It usually comes with purple. It usually fills me with motion, gives me purpose. But today I cannot welcome it.

I am reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”. It is full of unhappy writing. My thoughts have been discolored by its gloom.

There are a good two hours before I can let myself go to bed.