From the crayon box

Akumal, MX

I know I’m not the only person who loves the brand new box of crayons, the bigger pack the better. All those tips not yet worn down, all those colors laid out in their tidy rows. And that brand-new-crayon smell!

I had a favorite crayon color: blue-green. It was in the 64-pack with sharpener, of course, and in the satisfyingly square 48-back too. Its color was more like turquoise than aqua. More azure than teal. Closer to cornflower than to royal blue. It was blue like a blue sky, but not like the ones in Pennsylvania. It was the blue of a summer mountain sky, late in the day over a body of water. It was blue-green and not at all green-blue, which was a crayon color of its own.

It’s one of the blues just at the horizon of a Caribbean ocean view on a sunny day. It’s not the foamy greens up close or the baby blues just below the clouds. It’s just past the second line of breakers, yet lighter somehow.

Blue-green almost like dreamy old eyes remembering. Almost like the egg of a robin, which is bluer. Almost like the muddy turquoise of my kitchen walls, left behind by the people who had my house for fifty whole years before me— but that’s greener. Blue-green like the scales of an imaginary dragon. Like a soft shirt I loved but outgrew so soon.

I’m participating in the Slice of Life Challenge
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One thought on “From the crayon box

  1. First this is about a new box of crayons – which I am totally for .. (although now that I know crayola usese beef in their crayons, I can’t be quite as excited for them … but new colored pencils and markers and flair pens are still amazing…)

    But then this is all about a very specific blue and I fell in love with your description – especially the last line.

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