These are not the colours of my sadness and pain. The colours of the emotions I feel for the younger self I wrote about yesterday. Her sorrows are deep purples and blues, stretching into long twilights, the one searching the stars for one that might assuage her loneliness. Her longings are mauves and violets, the brief, barely felt surge when someone noticed her, when she thought she was important enough to connect to. I don’t know why I never liked her, why I never loved her.

She had this way of looking at the world that was expansive, seeing the multi-dimensions of the moment: feelings as colours, touch as pain, loneliness as a weight on her soul. She saw things in a way that I could never understand, me with my world reduced to equations of motion – she was the quantum mechanics to my solid indivisible atoms. She was the relativity theory to my Newtonian frame.

I see her with pale blue eyes, large, that shift in a moment to take on the colours of her surroundings. She noticed the small living things that noone had time for, and the feelings that people couldn’t feel. Her heart broke over so many things, and yet she put it back together and kept loving others as she could never love herself.

I see her now through the lens of compassion. Time is no barrier to stepping back to be beside her. Even for a middle child, spanned by five years either side, I can march up to her and whirl her around. I wonder if she would like that? I could dance with her, carry her on a merry jig, and enfold her in my love.

These are the colours of compassion, the unfolding flower that I give to her.

I think I can see her smiling.

Love,
Jane