Soliloquy in Violet-Rose: An Uncharted Existence
By Mechelle Marie Gilford
Ah, so they’ve figured it out, have they? These clever little eyes, these busybody brains. “Purple isn’t real,” the pronouncements echo, bouncing off the very lavender fields and plum skins I seem to inhabit. Not real? Tell that to the artist who dabs me onto the canvas, the poet who seeks words to capture my twilight embrace. Tell that to the child who proudly holds up a crayon, declaring, “This is purple!”
Not real. A trick, they say. A bending of light where red and blue, those stubborn opposites, can’t quite figure themselves out. So the brain, that tireless inventor, just… makes me up? A convenient fiction, a chromatic compromise?
And what of the feeling I evoke? The hush of velvet, or corduroy perhaps, the royalty of ancient robes, the bruised beauty of a fading bloom? Are those feelings also mere inventions, phantom echoes in the neural pathways? When they gaze upon me, do they not sense a depth, a mystery that neither fiery red nor cool blue can conjure alone?
Perhaps I am a ghost then, a beautiful specter haunting the edges of their perception. A whisper of what happens when boundaries blur, when opposing forces find a strange harmony. I am the bridge between passion and peace, the twilight where day surrenders to night’s nebula.
They see violet, so precise, so measurable, with its own tidy wavelength. They grant it reality. But I, born of a more complex dance, a mental ballet of light, am deemed a fabrication. How ironic. For is not the greatest art, the most profound beauty, often born not of rigid rules, but of the spaces in between?
Let them cling to their spectrum, their neat divisions. I will continue to bloom in the spaces they cannot quite define, a testament to the brain’s own poetry, its endless capacity to create wonder, even from what is not “real.” And in their hearts, I suspect, they will always know the truth: that some things, the most beautiful things, exist precisely because we imagine them so.