Back to Blue
What happens between us
happens in darkness, vanishes
easy and often as each breath.
—Sylvia Plath
Blue is the colour that soothes me, the darker the better.
Two years ago, I sanded down my wooden table and painted it the darkest blue I could find. I sealed it with coats of polyurethane until the surface shone. With the edge of a sleeve, it catches the light in its darkness. The table evokes the sea—its glass-like stillness before a storm, when the wind darkens the water.
The colour rescued me from the loneliness that followed a break-up. The relationship ended abruptly because, in his words, I was too remote. I pulled away when I felt myself slowly merging into him, losing the boundaries of my own body.
After he was gone, I had to find my way back to myself, like searching for a path through an overgrown garden. Still, I longed for him deeply. He drew me as the moon draws water.
I lay on the floor listening to Amy Winehouse—descending minor chords—feeling like the tiny penny in the song, rolling up the walls inside me.
I painted the other walls of my house midnight blue, standing on ladders late into the evening. I wanted a place where my eyes could rest. Above the mantel, the blue brought out the yellow of the stained-glass piano windows set high near the ceiling. I was never allowed to learn the piano; my father said my hands were too small, my fingers unable to reach the keys or produce a resonant sound.
Against the blue wall, I rehung a painting of Belle Île—jagged cliffs weathered by wind and rain—a place I had known as a child. Looking at the walls, I felt like the Little Prince, falling in love with a colour the way he fell in love with a flower.
We had met during the isolation of the pandemic. I fell too quickly, as if under a spell. His presence had a hypnotic effect—my heartbeat syncing with his, as though I could dissolve into him. We walked everywhere, holding hands through damp November woods along a winding silver river.
One day, we walked from a small beach out onto a breakwater. A sign warned of rip currents strong enough to pull a swimmer from shore. I wondered what there was for me to know. The first week of a love affair always reveals its ending.
Out on the jetty, the wind roared. In a dreamlike voice, he recited lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—death-fires dancing at night, the water green and blue.
I did not yet understand the curse in those words. I only felt something shift—an orbital pull, a deepening I could not name.
As the affair progressed, what had felt like intimacy hardened into vigilance. His desire became possessive; to cope, I became elusive. I missed the spaciousness of being alone, the freedom I once had to tend my garden, the moss and flowers. I guarded the minutes when I could be by myself.
When we broke up, I missed him. The paradox persisted: thinking of him meant I was never alone. Of everything I missed, it was his black guitar—named Savannah—that remained most vividly with me.
I inherited what Roland Barthes called the lover’s fatal identity:
*
My favourite professor in college had a devotion to the colour blue: blue suits and blue-tinted glasses. He lectured at length on what he called the blue periods of writers and artists, returning often to Picasso’s The Old Guitarist and the cold restraint of a monochromatic palette. I was moved, faintly grasping what a colour could carry.
From this, a sensibility formed—a pull to someone who might sing me a love song, softening what ached inside me. The ache was familiar. On certain days, it flooded everything: the days when I lay horizontal on my bed. Time passed without contour.
In my twenties, I learned that reality is not fixed, that thoughts and feelings shift like colour—blue, blue-green—never as solid as they first appear.
In my coat pocket, I carried a piece of worn blue beach glass, a small talisman against the grief I carried everywhere.
*
When my mother died, I wrapped my grief in a blue wool blanket, edged with worn satin. After her passing, my father threw it away, believing it would prolong my attachment to something that was gone. Two men carried her cold body through the door of the childhood house for the last time. She would not return. I was thirteen.
Before she died, we visited her in the hospital, where she lay behind a pale blue screen. She wore a light blue gown. Her face was small and colourless, her hair cropped short and falling out in patches. She was forty-eight.
“Let’s bring her a tea shall we?” the nurse asked. She always left before an answer was given. Tea was always the answer, never a question.
The ward was inside a Victorian hospital close to the sea, the same place where I was born. Through the window, the water was sometimes a deep, brilliant blue; on other days it dulled beneath low clouds. The weather determined how much hope the sea could offer.
Still we looked through the window, holding on to cups of tea.
My mother did not get better. Doctors prescribed blue pills that flattened her moods, smoothing peaks and valleys. No risks to take, no precipices to encounter. No more cliff sides of majestic enduring beauty.
At the hospital, needles found the blue veins in her arms, winding from wrist to elbow like lines on a map. I looked out the window at an imagined horizon—a dark blue sea, a darker line where it ended.
At night, the room was filled with blue light. I don’t know what kind of light it was—only that it softened the edges of everything, pressing itself into corners, climbing the walls. When she came home, the blue followed her into the bedroom where she would die. It gathered in the mirror above her dressing table. When she died, the mirror seemed to swallow the light. Then her.
*
Who shouted for joy
when the color blue was born?
—Pablo Neruda
When I painted the walls blue, I knew they would never stay the same. The colour shifted with the hour, the light, my own state of mind—tranquil one moment, melancholic the next.
Across the walls, I began to paint white cyanotypes of crocus and star flowers, a fern with its fronds outstretched. It required a particular kind of concentration, reached through deep ambient music or the steady sound of rain. It’s difficult to paint the shadow of a flower petal on a wall.
But it softened the edges. It helped me carry one moment into the next.
After a while, I understood I was painting the space around the flowers rather than the flowers themselves—the gaps, the outlines, the shape of what was missing. I was trying to paint a disappearance: tiny white petals held against a dark blue wall.
I placed petals and leaves on dark paper and left them on a sunny windowsill. At night, I dreamt of blue flowers with petals like the cut-outs of a cotton nightdress. I dreamt of negative space, defined by what is not there.
These were childhood dreams. The nights when I searched for my mother in a darkness I didn’t know how to cross. I traveled by sleep, wearing my yellow and blue nightdress.
*
After painting the walls, I moved outside to the garden, where I planted cornflowers and forget-me-nots, and lupins. I wanted to summon the bluebell woods from childhood, where small blue flowers grew in the cool shade beside the yellow daffodils. We used to walk through those woods before my mother became ill.
I planted a larkspur in the half-shade at the back of the garden. Each spring, it returned, rising on thin green stalks after disappearing through winter. The larkspur moved easily in the wind, resembling alpine flowers that survive by yielding rather than resisting. I wondered if a song had ever been written for them, the way there are songs for other mountain flowers.
*
Sometimes life passes through a deep blue filter, edges soften, faces blur, petals fall slowly. In college I learned to see this in a poem.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.
I realized I always search for my mother’s face, ghostlike but beautiful, in every crowd.
In the cancer ward, nothing passed through the pale blue screen. My mother could not project a life without illness. I wished I could have read her the poem, and held her hand. Time alone made its way through the pale blue screen, passing slowly then gradually gathering speed like a train leaving a station.
By June, she was gone.
At home, my father threw away the blue wool blanket. The memory of it outlived her. Sometimes the things we cling to vanish first.
I return, often, to a small childhood room with a narrow bed and a shelf with tattered books. One contained a poem about a blue devil who sailed to sea in an eggshell. Each morning, I leafed through the pages, tracing the devil’s journey, feeling a quiet sinking in my chest.
*
My mother’s life is a story that I write in blue ink, diluted with water, fading across the page, making her everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote of walking in moonlit tea fields after his mother died, feeling her presence.
She was the moonlight. Together, my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.
I walk with my mother, always to the sea, just like in the painting above the mantel. We leave footprints in the damp sand, glancing at the dark blue sea and the horizon just out of reach.
And then she leaves, as quickly as she came. Back to blue. Back to tread her troubled track.