RESATURATION

I.

My parents divorced when I was a baby.  A few hours after my mom dropped me off at my dad’s for the weekend, she ran into him at the mall outside the toddlers’ play area.  But she didn’t see me, the purple dress, or the bow she’d put in my smoothed hair.  Panicked, she asked my dad where I was.  He pointed to a little girl with pigtails in denim overalls and a brown flannel.  The girl played with a blonde woman—my stepmom, who’d changed my clothes within minutes of my arrival at their house.  For years, I had separate wardrobes at each of their houses.

*

Color theory is based on consistency.  The same colors always support each other, work alongside each other, oppose each other.  A color wheel is the equivalent of a family tree.  The distance between colors signifies their relationships.  Equidistant from each other, red, yellow, and blue are an unconventional threesome:  the triad version of Adam and Eve, but instead of populating the world, they birthed color after color.

*

At my dad and stepmom’s, I lived with three step-siblings older than me by 10, 12, and 13 years. When I was in elementary school, we ate hot dogs and canned peaches with whip cream on paper plates while watching reruns of CSI: Miami.  We ate off of our laps; dusty cooking magazines covered the coffee table.  In my bedroom, I had my own computer and cable TV.

*

At my mom’s, it was just the two of us.  We didn’t watch TV or have a computer.  We crafted jewelry, read in the hammock, and cooked vegetarian meals.  For dessert, we ate three low-fat Oreos or a half-cup of fat free frozen yogurt.  I couldn’t leave a pair of flip flops in the hallway without hearing about it.

*

Across the color wheel from each other, complementary colors are perfect in their opposition: red and green, blue and orange, purple and yellow.  When paired, their high contrast makes for a vibrancy that can be overwhelming in high doses.

*

I watched my mom dress for a date when I was eleven.  She wore purple underwear and a matching purple bra when I’d never seen her wear anything but black or beige under her clothes.  I sat down on her waterbed.  As gentle waves lapped my thighs, I knew something had shifted.

*

Her new boyfriend was a self-proclaimed Happy Man who wore Hawaiian shirts with rainbows of hibiscus flowers, palm trees, and oceans of blue.  A great contrast to my mom’s nearly all-black wardrobe.  She’d been overweight in her childhood and my grandmother never let her forget it—always told her she looked thinner in black.  It took until her relationship with Happy Man for my mom to embrace color in her wardrobe; purple pants, orange sweaters, crazy floral shirts.

*

The Valentine’s day I was twelve, I stayed at my dad’s for the weekend.  Blood turned the blue lace of my favorite underwear a deep purple.  I cried.  I’d crossed into new territory and needed my passport stamped with a hug from my mom, some acknowledgement my debilitating cramps were cause for celebration.  But she wasn’t there.  Happy Man had taken her on a romantic get-away.  I couldn’t bring myself to tell my dad or stepmom.  It felt too private.  Too momentous.  For the rest of the weekend, I shoved wads of toilet paper between my legs, watched Animal Cops, and masturbated—orgasm relieved the pain.

*

The summer before 8th grade, I kissed girls in the showers at camp.  At night in our cabin, we’d snuggle and talk about how we loved smelling our female friends’ hair, feeling the warmth of their bodies at sleepovers—but also our incessant crushes on boys.   I called my mom and declared:  I’m just sexual.  I don’t need a prefix for my desire.  She laughed and said, Glad you have it all figured out, babe.

*

In 1969, sixty members of the Gay Liberation Front and the Society for Individual Rights staged a protest outside The San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper that published disparaging articles about the city’s gay and lesbian bars.  In response, the newspaper’s staff allegedly poured a barrel of purple printer ink from the roof onto the protesters.  The demonstrators raged, stamped purple handprints all over the building and downtown San Francisco to say: We refuse to be silenced.  To this day, the purple hand is a signifier of queer activism.

*

When I  returned from camp, my mom told me she’d sold the little brick house in Albany we’d lived in for almost ten years.  We were moving into a new house with Happy Man, a sprawling four-bedroom in the suburbs.  I was excited for the change.

*

The house was a blank canvas.  Blue his color of choice, hers purple.  We painted the kitchen drawers blue and purple.  My mom collaged a tissue paper rainbow on the kitchen table.  She set up her purple glass collection on the living room’s wide windowsill: square and oblong vases, ridged and smooth plates on clear stands, bowls of all sizes.  When light passed through the glass in the afternoon, purple shadows danced across blue walls.

*

Analogous colors live next to each other in harmony on the color wheel.  Blue, blue-violet, and violet make good neighbors; they cohabitate without tension.

*

Obama’s HOPE campaign was in full swing our first year in the new house.  My mom and Happy Man donated money to Obama and we received HOPE T-shirts in return.  I wore mine proudly.  When I asked my dad who he’d vote for, he said: I’m not ready for a Black president.  I knew my parents’ political ideologies differed, but I never knew how much.  As a budding liberal, I grew resentful of my dad’s conservative views.  I didn’t tell him about my queerness, afraid he’d piss on my rainbow.

*

My room at my mom’s was a mess of patterned dresses, costume jewelry, and floral print sheets.  By the end of elementary school, I sloughed off the athletic wear my dad liked and fancied myself a thrift store queen like my mom.  In contrast to my new peers’ polos, I wore metallic leggings, polka-dot dresses, and pink Converse I’d adorned with bottle caps and sparkly buttons at camp.  Even if I tried to conform, I wouldn’t fit in; I had no place in the social hierarchy my peers had been building since elementary school.  Instead, I made friends with the smart girls I gravitated toward, regardless of their position on the ladder.  My social life was a series of tangents.  Always on the edge, never the middle.

*

Mid-way through the fall, my dad and stepmom gave me two week’s notice they were moving three hours north to a 400-acre property.  Buttfuck, New York was desolate, save for a Walmart and a military base.  The majority of my stepmom’s family lived up there.  They were kind until it turned to politics.  When I was around, my step-grandma had a book she always seemed to display: How to Talk to Democrats.

*

I hadn’t made an effort to see my dad in months and felt like he was punishing me by moving.  Instead of closing the distance between us, I ignored his phone calls and refused to visit after he moved.

*

My mom tells me I’m lucky to have inherited her brain and my dad’s looks.  My mom is booksmart, an attorney, a lover of crosswords.  When I tell her she’s beautiful, she says that she looks like every other Jewish mother: eyes too close together, upper-arms sagging, unruly hair.  My dad is tall and muscular, with Nordic features.  He never did well in school, but he can build boats and sit in a tree for hours before making a kill shot into a deer’s heart or lungs.  His life exists in shades of green and brown.

*

I’ve never identified with brown: ugly and dull.  I’ve always preferred black as my accent color.

*

When I was sixteen, I started dating Clark.  Instead of sharing details about my day with my mom and Happy Man, I called Clark.  I skipped family dinners and board games in favor of listening to him strum three chords and make sounds somewhere between singing and screaming.  One night, my mom said Clark could come over even though she and Happy Man were going out—but only if we promised to “keep three feet on the floor.”  Clark and I both had sex for the first time that night.  It was my idea.  I thought sex would transform me into an adult, someone enlightened.  My mom arrived home early and heard us.  She banished Clark from our house and made me write an essay about why I thought it was a good idea to have sex when I was so young—my first foray into creative nonfiction.

*

Clark and I spent hours in his little red car, smoking Parliaments and eating Milk Duds.  We had sex at his house when his parents weren’t home.  He’d finger me for a minute before asking if I was ready and slipping on a condom.  I always said yes, though the penetration often hurt so badly I wished the stinging inside me would turn to gushes of blood so I’d have a tangible reason to tell him to stop.

*

He introduced me to a crowd of tattooed twenty-somethings who lived in downtown Albany.  I kept these friends after Clark and I broke up.  We drank dollar tallboys, packed bowls of ditch weed, and chain-smoked inside their run-down apartments.  I seduced men and studied cracks in their ceilings while they fucked me.  It all felt very adult.

*

My friends locked themselves in bedrooms to snort heroin.  I pounded on the doors, but they yelled through the wood that I was too young, too smart to end up like them.  I stomped off, pissed.

*

I spent more time downtown in the hopes of feeling less excluded.  I lied about where I was, knowing my mom wouldn’t approve.  When she caught me, she told me I was only allowed to leave the house for school.  I snuck out at night and my friends picked me up.  Happy Man and I stopped speaking.  We lost the biggest thing we had in common—a good relationship with my mom.

*

The brightness of her house started giving me headaches.  Even the neon colors in my own room were too much.   I tossed my floral sheets in the closet and donated my colorful clothes.

*

My seventeenth year was a dark cocoon.  The things that comforted me were cigarettes, curtain-drawn naps, and painting my nails black.

*

Ecological Valence Theory asserts color preference is determined by what a person associates with that color.

*

I started calling my dad every day.  He listened while I complained about how my mom made me call her on the home phone when I returned from school so she could see the number on her caller-ID, and how she called my friends’ parents to make sure I was where I said I’d be.  He talked about how his  biggest worry on the farm was making sure the feral cats had enough hay in their chicken coop to keep from freezing when the snow came.  It sounded peaceful, like his life went at the pace of a crank pencil sharpener, while mine spun like an electric one that ate all the yellow if I looked away.

*

My mom and I ignored each other unless it was to yell.  There was no trust, no chance of that changing.  I daydreamed about throwing her favorite purple glass lamp at her head.  I knew if I stayed a day longer I might.

*

I broke up with mom and moved in with my dad two months into my senior year.

*

He and stepmom lived between wood paneling and coyote brown carpeting.  In the living room were mahogany leather couches and the bust of an eight-point buck my dad shot.  The walls of my bedroom were the color of sand, my rug the color of dirt.  The students at my new school wore camo like the students at my old school wore polos.  I didn’t fit in there either.  I spent all my free periods reading to fill the void of friendlessness.

*

Weeks later, I went back to my mom’s to get the rest of my stuff.  I put my key in the lock, but it wouldn’t turn.  I burst into tears when I realized she changed the locks, my useless key digging into my clenched fist.

*

Brown is associated with consistency and dependability.

*

I quit smoking and gained thirty pounds.  My dad and stepmom let me borrow their cars, bought me my own groceries, and asked me to regale them with the happenings of my days.  We watched TV, took walks, and never talked politics.  Neutral tones started to feel like home.

*

In the spring, my dad and stepmom took me shopping for future dorm-room decorations.  I picked out a black blanket, a black rug, a black lamp.  The last store we went to was filled with patchouli smoke and racks of tie-dyed shirts.  My eyes gravitated toward a purple tapestry with asymmetrical blue moons and stars on the far wall of the shop.  The woman working climbed onto a ladder and took the thumbtacks out of the wall.  Instead of dropping them to the floor, she stuck them between her lips—pin-side out.  I wanted to kiss her.

*

I hung the tapestry by my dorm-room bed.  It reminded me of my mom.  I responded to her emails and called her back periodically, but I wasn’t ready to put in more effort than that.  I was preoccupied with my classes, friends, and dealing with a new roommate each semester.  If my roommates asked to keep the lights on, or have a boy over, I always said yes, even if I wanted to say no.  I thought I was “chill” if I avoided conflict, especially any confrontation that could snowball into fights like the ones I had with my mom.  My unhappiness morphed into door slamming and avoiding the room for days at a time.  When my roommates tried to talk to me, I fled.

*

The summer before my sophomore year, I started running and lost a bunch of weight.  I borrowed a friend’s purple, velour dress to wear on one of the first nights back at school.  The dress was short, sleeveless, and sexy—a contrast to the baggy t-shirts I used to hide my body.  That night, I was high on all the compliments about my appearance.  I danced and flirted and felt like I might finally leave black behind.  My fledgling happiness fell out of the nest and splattered on the concrete when a hand slid up my dress and into my underwear.  I froze. Then watched as his blue jeans and red shirt disappear into the crowd.

*

Purple is a blend of blue and red.  She takes the edge off blue’s detachment and softens red’s fiery emotion.  Purple communicates her feelings gently, but with purpose.

*

I reverted back to wearing only black.  Though I hadn’t been drunk that night, I stopped drinking as a preventative measure.  I also stopped seeking out sexual or romantic partners and called myself “A Born Again Virgin.”  I listened Bikini Kill and read feminist manifestos.  I lost friends because they didn’t want to hear my killjoy comments about patriarchal influences in classroom dynamics.

*

My father told me I was lucky what happened wasn’t worse, to lighten up and let the assault go.  I called my mom for comfort.  She listened to me cry and told me it wasn’t my fault.

*

Sexual Assault Awareness groups use purple to honor those who’ve faced relationship or sexual violence.  I imagine this choice as a way to reclaim the purple of a bruise, physical or emotional.  These groups wrap purple lights around trees, hang purple banners, and brandish purple ribbons. At school, there was Purple Week—five days dedicated to wearing purple in solidarity for ending sexual violence.  I wanted to participate, but I only owned black.

*

My sophomore year roommate and I were on good terms until her boyfriend started staying over.  I told her I didn’t care if she slept naked, but he had to wear boxers.  Morning after morning, I woke to see his limp penis from across the room.  Communication hadn’t worked.  I returned to passive aggression and icy silence.

*

For the first time in a year, I went to my mom’s house over winter break.  Her purple glass, blue walls, and rainbow kitchen made me woozy, intoxicated with color.  Instead of staying for two nights as planned, I stayed for over a week.  We went bra shopping, made veggie stir-fries, and read each other Dear Abby like we once did.

*

We only talked about our breakup once.  She told me she saw a mother and daughter around our ages out shopping, talking, and laughing.  She missed me so much she ran out of the store and wept in her car for an hour before driving home.

*

I’d always thought my departure felt like an exhale to her, a relief.

*

I wish I’d reached my hand across the table, as if we could forgive each other with the meeting of our skin.  Instead, I blurted out: Do you want to help me pick out a new pair of boots?  She smiled.  We sat at the kitchen table and scrolled through the Doc Martin website.  When we got to a bright purple pair, we looked at each other and nodded.  We both knew I was ready for change.

II.

I wore my new boots in the snow and marveled at the way the purple whitened the white and the white purpled the purple.  I dug the toe of my boot into the snow and kicked the powder into the air.  A snowburst.

*

White light is the presence of all colors; our eyes process a rainbow when we look at something as mundane as a snow bank or a white wall.

*

When grass replaced snow, I took long walks in my purple boots, captivated by the contrasting colors.

*

Color theory posits that purple and green aren’t warm or cool, but simultaneously warm and cool.  Both are also secondary colors.  Between them are tertiary colors, like purple-red (magenta) and yellow-green (chartreuse).  Magenta and chartreuse are complementary, which explains the high contrast and captivating visual experience of their relatives: purple and green.

*

After nearly a year of celibacy, I felt ready to have sex again.  My lover that summer was J.  He was devilishly handsome, with blue eyes that disappeared when he smiled and white teeth that glistened between full lips.  He prided himself on making me come, derived his pleasure from mine.  We spent every night under his multi-colored string lights and neon rainbow of black-light glow index cards he’d tacked to his wall.  I loved him, but knew the feeling wasn’t reciprocated.  At the end of the summer, I moved to New York City for a semester.

*

A man in expensive cologne and a J.Crew polo charmed me with his chest hair, stories from visiting twenty countries, and his beautiful, fluent Spanish.  After a lavish dinner, we ate rice pudding in a park on the Lower East Side.  He asked me out again.  I said yes, but he’d have to accept that I wasn’t interested in monogamy; I also wanted to date women.  He agreed.

*

The Prince of Excess lived on the Lower East Side in a small room with one window directly facing another building.  Nothing hung on the dingy white walls.  A wad of navy blue sheets sat on top of a mattress he’d shoved into the corner.  The only other color in the room was the yellow faux wood grain of his bookshelf and the incessant flickering of his TV.  I couldn’t fathom how someone could survive in a room with empty walls and no sunshine.

*

Instead of seeing his lack of color as a sign of incompatibility, I filled his blank spaces with mine.

*

I bought him a wall-sized tapestry with bright, funky, abstract shapes, and a rainbow tie-dye tapestry for the bed.  I covered the walls with photographs of us and love notes I’d written him in purple pen.

*

Gift giving is a way of marking claim to another person.

*

The gifts he gave me—$15 cocktails in speakeasies, steak dinners, free rent, Uber rides, black tie balls, a South American vacation—dug deeper into me than the thumbtacks I’d used to etch myself into his bedroom walls.  His family’s wealth was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.  And I wanted more.  To play The Princess of Excess, I shrunk myself from a twelve to a six, routinely paid someone to rip all the hair off my vulva, and acted as arm candy—standing next to him silently as his relatives talked about brunching with Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

*

I didn’t date anyone else; I was afraid of causing a riptide that would suck me away from the Shores of Excess.

 *

On weekends, The Prince of Excess rarely left his apartment .  If I went to see friends, he moped.  We’d get high and order in pasta and pizza and chicken and waffles and truffle fries and duck confit and spend entire days watching Netflix.  He paid for everything.  Some weekends, I never saw the sun.

*

I ping-ponged between his apartment, school, and two jobs.  I had no space of my own.  I spent my paychecks on a sparkly purple phone case, purple pens, a reusable purple bag, a purple backpack, a purple moleskin, a purple hoodie.  I comforted myself with portable purple paraphernalia.

*

It was date-night.  I wore a purple dress, a purple sweater, and sparkly purple flats.  Before we left he said: Are you really going to wear that? I traded my sweater and shoes for black ones, not wanting to embarrass the man who funded my life.

*

I moved Upstate for the spring semester, then back in with The Prince of Excess for summer.  I took a job gardening in Central Park.  I wanted to learn how to nestle myself within city’s concrete and steel and grow and grow and grow.

*

I visited six sporting goods stores and asked if they had purple work boots.  Each employee shook their head: Black and brown only.  The day before I started working, I caved and bought a brown pair.  They fit well, but I resented them for their lack of purple pizzazz.

*

Brown is made by mixing complementary colors: green and red, blue and orange, yellow and purple.  Even brown is made by combining colors I love.

*

I went on a quest to find purple shoelaces for my ugly boots.  The woman working the register at a shoe store smiled:  I love these laces.  And your purple backpack.  And your purple hoodie.  Wow.  I thought I was a purple freak.  Aside from our love of the color, we found that we also shared a birthday:  February 8th, 1994.  Our birthstone: amethyst.  As fast as we’d bonded, I was back on the street, staring at stains on the pavement whose origins I didn’t care to know.

*

Rain poured my first two days of work in the park.  My boots were caked with mud, but the purple laces made me smile.  My purple lunch box, hair ties, water bottle, and coffee mug made an impression on my new coworkers.  They nicknamed me Purple Raina.

*

Prince has his own color purple: Love Symbol #2, inspired by his custom-made purple piano.

*

I worked in a section of the park on the Upper West Side with a woman named Jana.  She braided her gray waist-length hair into a plait down her back.  Gardening was her third career, after being a mother and a graphic designer.  When her firm downsized, she’d moved from an office with many windows to a cubicle that rarely saw sunlight.  To protest, she trained ivy to grow up the walls.  When the vines reached the top of the wall and sent tendrils toward the ceiling, her supervisor told her she had to trim the plant, or she was fired.  She left.  The ivy stayed.  She told me she wished—an agnostic’s prayer—that her cubicle’s next inhabitant would fight for her ivy, though she knew the vines were doomed.

*

Within the first week of working in the park, my lilac-colored glasses shattered.  I hadn’t anticipated the park’s deeply artificial nature.  Some have said it’s as man-made as Disneyland—every boulder, patch of grass, and tree predetermined by the park’s private owners.  The grounds in my section were governed by the wealthy donors who lived in the brownstones across the street.  They wanted blooms all summer.  As soon as a round of flowers dropped their petals, we scooped their mangled bodies and threw them away.  The next day, eighteen-wheelers delivered new flats of flowers for us to plant.

*

I found solace weeding within verbena, purple coneflowers, purple pom poms, and catmint—purple perennials in an interior section of our garden.  Purple blooms and vibrant green stems brought me back to the calm of Upstate New York, though I could still hear Central Park West: squealing brakes, yelling drivers, and impatient horns.

*

I met a woman in a bar at the end of the summer.  We giggled for hours, complimented each other, made excuses to touch—femme flirting.  I wanted to kiss her tan shoulders.  And I did.  The Prince of Excess didn’t look at me for days.

*

When I moved back North for my last year of school, I let go of The Prince of Excess.

*

I also let go of tending other people’s gardens.

*

I hung my purple celestial tapestry, draped a purple sheet over my couch, and strung purple twinkle lights around my very own room.  I ordered twenty baby succulents on Jana’s recommendation.  I’d never been a plant owner, but wanted something green to care for.  She told me I’d love the variety of their shapes and how they’d last for years because they were so forgiving.  I was giddy for the succulents’ contrasting green to arrive.

*

The relationship between purple and green is deeper than color theory and my purple-boot walks.  The physics of vision connect purple and green in a phenomenon called the afterimage.

*

Afterimages are an optical illusion orchestrated by our brains for our eyes.  If we stare at one color for more than sixty seconds, the receptors for that specific hue tire.  As soon as we look away, the receptors for that color’s equal and opposite counterparts start to work so the initial receptors can rest.  Magenta and green are complementary colors of light; their receptors are opposites.

*

Looking at purple makes our magenta sensors tired, so to give them a rest when we look away, our brain stimulates our green receptors.  If we look at a purple wall and then glance at a green plant, it appears more vivid because the green receptors were already activated to rest the magenta sensors, so seeing more green makes them extra excited and active.  The opposite is also true.  If we spend a quantity of time looking at green, anything with magenta tones we see next will appear brighter.

*

The succulents appeared in a box filled with white packaging peanuts.  There were brilliantly green knobby succulents; some with thick, flat appendages; some with fuzzy, frosted green arms like lamb’s ears; some with long, intimidating, but deceptively soft spines; and others with sharp barbs that bit if I dared put my finger near their flesh.  I planted each with space to grow and lined their pots on my windowsills.

*

When sunlight illuminated the succulents and my purple space, both appeared to glow.

*

In less than a year, my succulents tripled in size.  Their bodies bend toward the light of the window, but some limbs reach toward the interior of my room as if nurtured by purple’s aura, as if purple helps them extend into their full, juicy potential.

__

Raina K. Puels is the Nonfiction Editor of Redivider. She leaves a trail of glitter, cat hair, and small purple objects everywhere she goes. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Yes Poetry, Occulum, The American Literary Review, Berfrois, Queen Mob’s, Maudlin House, bad pony, and many other places. See more of her writing on her website: rainakpuels.com. Tweet her here: @rainakpuels