September is yellow. I don’t know why I know this, but the word is written in cursive script, same shade as the sun that shines most of its thirty days. The month is a yellowing leaf, wilting in the final push of summer heat, holding onto life before it falls.
September is yellow and October is orange and December is blue. January, white — for snow, for a new slate. February is pink and March is also pink, but a darker shade. April and May are sometimes green and usually no color at all. June is only June. I forget about the rest of summer. I wait for it to end, for the world to turn yellow again.
For those four yellow weeks I am a new age, no longer 25 or 26 or 27 but I feel the same (something is changing, I just can’t see it yet). The heat is on its way out and soon the world will die for a little while and it will come back different. In the Orange and the Blue, we’re transformed.
I see the colors and I map out the year ahead. I know the months I will leave and the months I will return. I see the weeks when I will turn inward, covered in sadness. I imagine how parts of me will die and others will come back to life in the months not bound by color, because I left them light.
Maybe I pulled these pigments from an old memory — imprinted from a kindergarten wall — colors bound in blocked letters that listed the days, the weeks, the months.
I’ve heard there is a syndrome where numbers and letters have colors, sounds, and smells.
But I don’t know what September smells like, or what it sounds like. I only know that it feels like catching my breath after a long sprint — proud to have finished the expanse of July when the sun lingered too long in the sky, on the skin. And of August, when days were still full to the brim with everything there was to do.
September is eager for a return to the cold — for the promise of slow change and a reason to curl up in man-made warmth.
Half summer, half not.
Half alive, half not.
Something on the way out that can’t yet see what is coming in.
Equilibrium doesn’t know she’s perfectly balanced — she can only ask for what she does not yet hold.
So this September I’ll savor that yellow brightness which holds everything and nothing at once — a yellow so bright it hurts, that I squint to look at it — through it — into what comes after this final exhale of summer, this fitting solar return.
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