Maybe I Have Always Loved Purple
1. Purple as second choice. My sister claimed blue. She claimed it before I even had the chance to consider the complex spectrum of color, the overwhelming array of potential answers to the most important question facing any five-year-old. Being the oldest, my sister always got first pickings, of bedrooms, of board games, of TV channels. I admired the sky and the sea, the bluebells our mother tended to in the boxes outside her bedroom window, the dusty coat of paint on the 1999 Honda minivan parked in the driveway. But I couldn’t have blue. I tried green out for a whil —not forest green, not lime; a softer hue. I was by far the more feminine child, drawn to dolls and frilly curtains instead of toy trucks and superhero posters, and as such, I only ever mused over pastels, the placidity of them. Green didn’t stick. Yellow was next (even shorter lived), then—reluctantly—pink.But pink felt like the easy choice, too obnoxiously feminine, the color that pretentiously painted every department store’s girls’ toy aisle. So I opted for pink’s close cousin, purple. At the time, it was a surrender, a refusal to slip into a comfortable caricature. But now, purple is as integral to me as the arteries that wind around my heart and rumba to its rhythm.
2. Purple as qualifier. I should make it clear—if it wasn’t already—that I only care deeply for light purples: lavender, wisteria, heather, amethyst; all the shades that bear the names of women. Those shades are a sisterhood. Those shades seem to cradle me, whisper in my ear when I’m disoriented, lace their lithe fingers through mine in a way no other color has ever come close to. Royal purple, Russian violet, magenta, grape: too harsh. Mulberry, sangria, wine, eggplant: too passive. Lavender knows when to step up and when to stand down. She is perceptive and kind and resilient.
3. Purple as pen pal. I was quick to make my affinity for purple known, but no one ever honored it—and shared in it quite like my Aunt Beth. It soon became a tradition for her to mail me gifts, not cash or hand-knitted sweaters like most of the adults I knew, but knick-knacks, small and seemingly inconsequential things found in the crannies and crevices of her cluttered apartment in West Texas. Fabric scraps and Pantone paint swatches and bottle caps and beads and bar soaps and stones from the communal patio. There wasn’t a regularity to the gifts either; they never came on birthdays or Christmases or graduations, but rather on Tuesday afternoons between school and ballet practice, or on Saturday mornings spent sitting on my tree swing. They were always accompanied with a handwritten note in the same purple ink. “Trying to clean up again. Didn’t get far before I found this and thought of you.”
4. Purple as regality. For millennia, purple has been thought of as a royal hue. The Persian Emperor Cyprus was the first ruler on record to insist on a wardrobe of only purple velvet tunics. A lineage of Ancient Roman Emperors made wearing purple as a commoner punishable by death. It was—still is—a privilege to drape yourself in a luscious mauve. At night, under purple bedsheets, awash in amber headlights bleeding through the blinds, I emerge from my body and melt into a memory that isn’t mine. I picture Aunt Beth swaying in her sun-splattered kitchen to Dolly Parton, purple nightgown hanging at her heels, spatula as scepter, a crown of curlers in her pearl blonde hair. She has always been royalty. She has always been divine.
5. Purple as time capsule. I was ten years old when I decided to replace the Barbie Dreamhouse in my room with a bookshelf. I went to fifteen discount furniture stores before I stopped counting, but after a week, I finally found the shelf of my mind’s eye: a modest but sturdy, five-shelf, lightwood for only $150. On the car ride home, I asked my dad if we could paint the shelf purple and, without protest, we took a detour to Home Depot’s paint aisle where I perused for two hours until I found the perfect shade of lilac. His respect for my purple-devotion was nearly as fervent as Beth’s. For the next five days, the muffled vocals of “Walk Like An Egyptian” and “Summer Of ‘69” wafted in from the garage alongside pungent paint fumes the hum of the sander. It was a labor of love. Pure love, which manifested in a space all my own to fill with artifacts. Ten years’ worth of books, some pristine and glossy and some with cracked spines and bent covers. Figurines of characters from TV shows now canceled. An owl-shaped piggy bank with coins stuck in its feet. A mason jar stuffed full of tiny purple objects.
6. Purple as forgone fortune. On the eve of my sixteenth birthday, Aunt Beth mailed me a stuffed bear wearing a periwinkle bonnet, a Beanie Baby, in like-new condition with tag intact, one of the few surviving stuffed animals from her daughter’s old collection. The folded note in the bottom of the box said, “Sell her online before you go to college. It’ll make a dent in your tuition.” I had always listened to Aunt Beth but, just this once, I lowered the tiny teddy gently onto my purple shelf, where she stayed, oil-stained and floppy from stuffing decay, smiling at me up until the day I left for college. I named her Birdie, despite what the heart-shaped tag said. I knew Aunt Beth would appreciate the cross-species irony.
7. Purple as affliction. Aunt Beth and I communicated almost exclusively through exchanging letters. I saw her on a few holidays scattered across my childhood but mostly remembered her as the woman who rushed through her dinner so she could read me a story while the other adults sat around the table and chattered. She never wanted me to feel left out, not having a placemat and a dish to my name like everyone else, a relentless reminder of my sickness. But I knew her better as strings of sentences than as the flow of blood or the stretch of sinew. So naturally, at seventeen, I was not prepared to see her face flushed in pallid plum undertones, eyes sunken, skin leathery and slack, deep purple rimming her milky cuticles and the all-too-prominent knobs of her bones, legs peppered with bruises, her famously manicured hair now frizzy and fraying. My own chronically-ill body entered that discolored and emaciated state once every few years like clockwork, but here I was alive and standing at her bedside, so I willed myself to believe, as I thumbed her walnut-wrinkled hand, that she would bounce back, too. She has to, I thought. She’s Aunt Beth.
8. Purple as pilgrimage. The memorial service was held a month later. On the drive there, somewhere around the one hour mark, resentment raked at my ribcage, and I almost convinced myself that I hated Aunt Beth—hated her for letting herself die, for not wearing enough sunscreen, for smoking cigarettes until her teeth yellowed and she didn’t have enough breath in her to read me stories anymore. But like my love for green and yellow and pink, the hatred was fabricated and faded quickly. There was no hating a woman who dotted every “i” with a heart and drew shrunken, shaky-handed landscapes inside the gaping loops of her “y”s. At least half the car ride passed with nothing in sight except for honeyed corn fields, rust-red tractors, and sleek silver wind turbines. That was until we approached a brick laid Del Rio city limits sign framed with funnels of lavender, the pinions of purple climbing their fluted stems, cresting at the top like a crown.
9. Purple as remnants. The first purple paint was called Tyrian Purple, a mid-purple with notes of fuchsia, made from the mucous membranes of Bolinus brandaris sea snails. Once they were heated, the pigments resembled powdery sediment, like the ashes scattered in the lake by Aunt Beth’s home—the lake where our family reunions had taken place for the past four generations, where my dad went to Boy Scout camp, where I learned to fish and use hand signals on a jet-ski. I wonder—when her ashes were overtaken by the current, pulled down beneath the blanket of blu —did the gray morph into purple, even just for a second?
10. Purple as likeness. In her final letter, which didn’t arrive until after she was gone, Aunt Beth wrote to me, “You and the color purple are one in my heart.” And how, in that moment, could I not suture my self-inflicted wounds with the spool of purple thread left in the bottom of that cardboard box? What a beautiful thing it is to be synonymous with the color of orchids and stardust and passionfruit and pinky promises. Maybe I was wrong before. Maybe—in some barely perceptible alcove of my mind—I have always loved purple.
2. Purple as qualifier. I should make it clear—if it wasn’t already—that I only care deeply for light purples: lavender, wisteria, heather, amethyst; all the shades that bear the names of women. Those shades are a sisterhood. Those shades seem to cradle me, whisper in my ear when I’m disoriented, lace their lithe fingers through mine in a way no other color has ever come close to. Royal purple, Russian violet, magenta, grape: too harsh. Mulberry, sangria, wine, eggplant: too passive. Lavender knows when to step up and when to stand down. She is perceptive and kind and resilient.
3. Purple as pen pal. I was quick to make my affinity for purple known, but no one ever honored it—and shared in it quite like my Aunt Beth. It soon became a tradition for her to mail me gifts, not cash or hand-knitted sweaters like most of the adults I knew, but knick-knacks, small and seemingly inconsequential things found in the crannies and crevices of her cluttered apartment in West Texas. Fabric scraps and Pantone paint swatches and bottle caps and beads and bar soaps and stones from the communal patio. There wasn’t a regularity to the gifts either; they never came on birthdays or Christmases or graduations, but rather on Tuesday afternoons between school and ballet practice, or on Saturday mornings spent sitting on my tree swing. They were always accompanied with a handwritten note in the same purple ink. “Trying to clean up again. Didn’t get far before I found this and thought of you.”
4. Purple as regality. For millennia, purple has been thought of as a royal hue. The Persian Emperor Cyprus was the first ruler on record to insist on a wardrobe of only purple velvet tunics. A lineage of Ancient Roman Emperors made wearing purple as a commoner punishable by death. It was—still is—a privilege to drape yourself in a luscious mauve. At night, under purple bedsheets, awash in amber headlights bleeding through the blinds, I emerge from my body and melt into a memory that isn’t mine. I picture Aunt Beth swaying in her sun-splattered kitchen to Dolly Parton, purple nightgown hanging at her heels, spatula as scepter, a crown of curlers in her pearl blonde hair. She has always been royalty. She has always been divine.
5. Purple as time capsule. I was ten years old when I decided to replace the Barbie Dreamhouse in my room with a bookshelf. I went to fifteen discount furniture stores before I stopped counting, but after a week, I finally found the shelf of my mind’s eye: a modest but sturdy, five-shelf, lightwood for only $150. On the car ride home, I asked my dad if we could paint the shelf purple and, without protest, we took a detour to Home Depot’s paint aisle where I perused for two hours until I found the perfect shade of lilac. His respect for my purple-devotion was nearly as fervent as Beth’s. For the next five days, the muffled vocals of “Walk Like An Egyptian” and “Summer Of ‘69” wafted in from the garage alongside pungent paint fumes the hum of the sander. It was a labor of love. Pure love, which manifested in a space all my own to fill with artifacts. Ten years’ worth of books, some pristine and glossy and some with cracked spines and bent covers. Figurines of characters from TV shows now canceled. An owl-shaped piggy bank with coins stuck in its feet. A mason jar stuffed full of tiny purple objects.
6. Purple as forgone fortune. On the eve of my sixteenth birthday, Aunt Beth mailed me a stuffed bear wearing a periwinkle bonnet, a Beanie Baby, in like-new condition with tag intact, one of the few surviving stuffed animals from her daughter’s old collection. The folded note in the bottom of the box said, “Sell her online before you go to college. It’ll make a dent in your tuition.” I had always listened to Aunt Beth but, just this once, I lowered the tiny teddy gently onto my purple shelf, where she stayed, oil-stained and floppy from stuffing decay, smiling at me up until the day I left for college. I named her Birdie, despite what the heart-shaped tag said. I knew Aunt Beth would appreciate the cross-species irony.
7. Purple as affliction. Aunt Beth and I communicated almost exclusively through exchanging letters. I saw her on a few holidays scattered across my childhood but mostly remembered her as the woman who rushed through her dinner so she could read me a story while the other adults sat around the table and chattered. She never wanted me to feel left out, not having a placemat and a dish to my name like everyone else, a relentless reminder of my sickness. But I knew her better as strings of sentences than as the flow of blood or the stretch of sinew. So naturally, at seventeen, I was not prepared to see her face flushed in pallid plum undertones, eyes sunken, skin leathery and slack, deep purple rimming her milky cuticles and the all-too-prominent knobs of her bones, legs peppered with bruises, her famously manicured hair now frizzy and fraying. My own chronically-ill body entered that discolored and emaciated state once every few years like clockwork, but here I was alive and standing at her bedside, so I willed myself to believe, as I thumbed her walnut-wrinkled hand, that she would bounce back, too. She has to, I thought. She’s Aunt Beth.
8. Purple as pilgrimage. The memorial service was held a month later. On the drive there, somewhere around the one hour mark, resentment raked at my ribcage, and I almost convinced myself that I hated Aunt Beth—hated her for letting herself die, for not wearing enough sunscreen, for smoking cigarettes until her teeth yellowed and she didn’t have enough breath in her to read me stories anymore. But like my love for green and yellow and pink, the hatred was fabricated and faded quickly. There was no hating a woman who dotted every “i” with a heart and drew shrunken, shaky-handed landscapes inside the gaping loops of her “y”s. At least half the car ride passed with nothing in sight except for honeyed corn fields, rust-red tractors, and sleek silver wind turbines. That was until we approached a brick laid Del Rio city limits sign framed with funnels of lavender, the pinions of purple climbing their fluted stems, cresting at the top like a crown.
9. Purple as remnants. The first purple paint was called Tyrian Purple, a mid-purple with notes of fuchsia, made from the mucous membranes of Bolinus brandaris sea snails. Once they were heated, the pigments resembled powdery sediment, like the ashes scattered in the lake by Aunt Beth’s home—the lake where our family reunions had taken place for the past four generations, where my dad went to Boy Scout camp, where I learned to fish and use hand signals on a jet-ski. I wonder—when her ashes were overtaken by the current, pulled down beneath the blanket of blu —did the gray morph into purple, even just for a second?
10. Purple as likeness. In her final letter, which didn’t arrive until after she was gone, Aunt Beth wrote to me, “You and the color purple are one in my heart.” And how, in that moment, could I not suture my self-inflicted wounds with the spool of purple thread left in the bottom of that cardboard box? What a beautiful thing it is to be synonymous with the color of orchids and stardust and passionfruit and pinky promises. Maybe I was wrong before. Maybe—in some barely perceptible alcove of my mind—I have always loved purple.
Caroline Wolff is a queer and disabled poet and essayist from San Antonio, TX. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing while working as an Arts & Culture journalist at San Antonio Current. When she isn’t writing, you can find her devouring a novel, going to pilates, snuggling with her tuxedo cat, or failing her driving test (again).
The Marbled Sigh 