Call Me Meg

Colors.

When I was 15, I realized I could see the world in colors. Some people recognize the tone of someone’s voice, or the smell of cut grass, or the taste of a certain chapstick. I feel them all through colors.

I can’t tell you how exactly I see it. To be completely honest, the way that people think and process and see differently confuses me to my core. I can’t understand it because I can’t see or feel the way you might see and feel. I don’t physically see colors when I think about skinning my knee, but I can tell you the memory associated with that pain, and I can tell you the color it makes me think of.

Skinning my knee as a child falling on the pavement feels like bright red. Getting road rash over and over on my right leg while rollerblading feels like a deep crimson with ribbons of soft blue (specifically my right leg; I never fall on my left). The sting of the pain shooting down my leg, surrounded by the cold fresh air of the morning.

I can tell you that hospital rooms make me think of mint green and sterile white, the two colors you often find in the floors and hospital sheets. But not only just because you find those colors there, I can feel the softness of the mint in the pain of breaking bad news. I can feel the harshness of the white bearing down on those close to death. Two sickly colors, one soft and one sharp. That is how hospitals feel to me.

Plane flights alone sparkle in the sunlight like silver. Other than take off and landing, I love plane flights. Gliding among the clouds, looking down on the rest of the world below you, peace and calm. The four times I have flown on a plane alone, I was going to and from England to visit my girlfriend, Eva. Planes feel sleek and fast and silver. Sparkling silver.

The seasons also have colors associated with them, in my mind.

Cut grass is a soft yellow. It is a warm ray of sunshine that warms your face in the summer. Chlorine and wet towels are a glittering blue, like sunlight on rippling water. Summer is yellow and blue. Winter is a cold icy blue. The taste of gingerbread cookies reminds me of a deep red, this one inviting. It doesn’t beckon you away, it brings you in and smothers you in a hug. The smell of fallen leaves is a beautiful orange. The feeling of oozing pumpkin guts is the same color. Fall is orange and yellow and a pale brown color, much like the trees that line the roads to my childhood home. Spring is a light green crayon shade, the growing grass, the blooming flowers. Chilly breezes and the end of a school year.

Different songs remind me of different colors too. Rickey Montgomery’s album, “Montgomery Rickey”, reminds me of a blue so pale it looks like it could be white. Comforting like soft ocean waves, it reminds me of a soft blanket and a fluffy pillow. Mitski’s album “Bury Me At Makeout Creek” is a deep sage green. The sadness and darkness in the lyrics and the time I obsessed over the album leave a brushstroke of a darker color in my heart.

The taste of pomegranate Burt’s Bees chapstick is a soft pink and reminds me of Honors Journalism 1, sophomore year. The taste of my watermelon lip gloss tastes like the summer of 2020 and reminds me of the color of a bright sunset.

I love the way I see the world. I love the colors of my life.

I was three years old when I remember reading for the first time. It wasn’t the first time I had been read to, nor the first time I had ever read a book. I’m sure other memories of reading have come before it, but they’re fuzzy and gray around the edges. But this one, I remember it sharply and clearly, no fuzz or distortion. Some memories you are told again and again, so often you feel as though you can see them, but my mother doesn’t tell me this story. That’s how I know it’s real.

It was probably sometime in the spring. I don’t remember the exact season, but I remember sitting inside my house, and seeing the sunlight filter through the windows behind me. My back was pressed up against the front of our couch, sitting on the floor. I was watching Wowowubzzy

reruns on PBS Kids when my mother interrupted me and sat down next to me. Someone sat on my left side, I believe it was my mother, and I don’t recall if my father sat to my right or sat in front of me. I can’t remember if he read this book with us either, but I remember he was somewhere close by. He just sat there and listened to my mother read it to him. My mother asked me for a few minutes away from my show, and even though I was annoyed, I complied.

The book was about divorce.

Of the little bits I remember, it was about a young boy, around eight years old,

whose parents were getting a divorce. I don’t remember anything specific about the story of the book, except for one photo of the boy, sitting on concrete steps outside of his house, talking to his mother. It looked like it was made out of construction paper. I remember the gray of the steps, and how the boy was hunched over. I remember nothing else of the book. Just that his parents were getting divorced.

My mother explained to me that soon, I would be this boy. My parents would go and move in separate homes, have separate lives, and I would be stuck in the middle of it. I would be their carrier pigeon for the next fifteen years of my life, until I turned eighteen and would be able to move out. I would live in two different worlds, one ruled by a queen with an iron fist, the other with a reckless king, still living like a bachelor into his fifties.

I understood none of it.

All I wanted was to get back to my Wowowubzzy episode and enjoy the last few years I had left of childhood.

I wish it wasn’t my first memory of reading. I know there are other, better memories somewhere in my mind. My mother would read to me all of the time. She took me to the library, came home with arms filled with books, and read each one to me. We had hand me down books, tiny cardboard books about princesses, picture books, chapter books – there has never been a time in my life without reading. I used to love to read at my mother’s house. I would sit in school, at home, at the library, reading as much as my head could handle. I got caught reading past my bedtime. I got caught trying to bring fifteen books home from the library. I was unproblematic for so long, I thought if I made one mistake it would all unravel.

When I began to drift away from reading at the start of high school, I was scared I would change forever. I was scared of growing up and growing out of the one thing that brought me comfort for years.

I wished I could go back to that little three year old, whose only complaint was not being able to finish a television show episode, who just wanted her parents to love her, and who didn’t put their burdens on her shoulders.

I was three years old when I remember reading for the first time.