Lilac!
here is an essay about my favorite color
A Substack I stumbled across suggested “write about one color” as a journaling prompt, so here we are. Everything is deeply horrible; this is a personal essay in the genre of “a light distraction” rather than “reckoning with everything going on.”
I have gone through a few “favorite color” periods. When I was a tween, it was lime green – I particularly remember that my fifth-grade sneakers were a pair of green mesh Pumas with a zigzagging Velcro closure. Anything I saw in that color delighted me, and I especially loved it paired with pink. When rummaging through boxes of my stuff that still lives at my parents’ house as part of a periodic “please get rid of some of this,” I often encounter a pink-and-green beaded bracelet or piece of fiber arts, evidence of the summers spent at arts-and-crafts camp during that time.
That is by far the strongest affinity for a color I remember having, until now. It’s long been frustrating to me that I didn’t have a favorite color – I have favorites of EVERYTHING. I can tell you which seltzer flavor and brand is my ideal, which of the jackets in my closet is the cutest, which of Chappell Roan’s songs is the best (it’s After Midnight, which is underrated). But I’ve felt like I was guessing vaguely at favorite colors – sometimes I’d say deep purple, which I liked, but that never really landed deeply.
In the past year, though, I’ve developed a total delight in all things lavender and lilac. My phone case is lilac. My home water bottle (with a straw, for ease of seltzer consumption) is lavender. When I bought a new couch from my apartment, I picked a gorgeous light purple velvety item. So I’ll find myself sitting on my purple couch in a purple PJ set drinking out of my purple tumbler and scrolling on my purple phone. My notebook also used to be purple, but I finished that one and moved on to a floral hardcover.
