Short Paper: “Purplets”

“Purplets”

 

  1. Most would glance and call it gray, but the head-bobbing motion reveals a secret color on the back of its neck. The sunlight shines and an iridescent purple shimmers, moving with its every step until it gains the running speed to take off and fly into the blue.
  2. The utmost luxurious space to spend a night. Purple walls, purple décor, and purple stairs, stacked to give a reader a tour through its elegance. However, the purple borders and the purple logo take away its royalty. It is a magic marker drawn on a hotel. Tacky, distracting, animated. I pray that the designer of the hotel did not actually choose royal purple as the accent color. [1]
  3. She does not speak English, but we understand her eyes, her roars, and her head snuggles with Donkey. She is a pudgy magenta dragon with a chain necklace and wings that make us question her weight one more time. She is a soft dragon, and she falls in love. Purple scales and purple breath. She blows a heart of smoke.[2]
  4. Purple neon. A glow of false pleasure. It’s uneasy, sexual joy, fooling the intoxicated, drawing in the sober. It’s a warm color gone cold, just like his heart from hers. [3]
  5. He sings to her in hopes to seek clarity. To help himself believe, and her the same. Let the purple rain[4] wash over both of them, let good judgement overcome the situation and prove his love and his becoming. What is purple rain? Hope?
  6. In all the hard headed opinions that erupt on the news, how can one be so far blue or so far red? What is in the middle? Rumor has it there is a source for that: Purple Politics. [5] Purple is pure, unbiased, honest, but in politics? Good luck.
  7. Purple is a color that you can see anywhere if you try, especially through paint. Color is relative, and purple turns into blues, grays, even greens. The Starry Night[6] may be blue to some, but it’s one of my favorites, and the shadows on the mountains reveal a cold, purple light that feels impossible to reach.
  8. The old muddiness of the undersides of shoes dull what used to be the bubblegum pink to what now exists as a lifeless purple. Against the gray cement it is pressed down to create a colorful design of its own. A blob. A mistake of laziness. And an imprint of someone else’s bad day. Relative purple.
  9. A piece of a mural, purple against warmth is an invitation to sit down and eat. It is a work of art, a business strategy, history on a building, a colorful sight to see. It draws in consumers and humors the painter. And the chef has the pleasure of feeding those who find hunger in the purple paint.[7]
  10. It is a hue of all colors. Looking for it I cannot find myself unable to see it. To me, it’s the lavenders from my backyard during childhood. It’s the lilac colored magic marker that had a translucent stroke that I could alter the harder I pushed. It’s the faded sweatshirt that came from white. It’s the sky whenever I want to see purple.
  11. He keeps returning to that purple light. It’s not his fault, it’s hers. She turned him into somebody else, as he worries about her somebody else. It’s fake. It’s a trick. It’s hate. It’s part of life. [8]
  12. Maybe it is royal. The purple atop of the stagnant blue of a dorm room. Luxury to bare necessity. Clean to cluttered. The more I look the more I see, and the sadder I get the less purple I can find. The less clarity exists in my life.
  13. He sees his mother’s bright purple nail polish sitting in the counter, the complement of the yellow bananas lined up next to it. He holds his stuffed leopard, her brown-gray fur fading to purple next to her copper eyes. And the ever-changing LED tea light, lighting up the room as it turns purple for a single second.[9]
  14. Just the right amount of purple in your life, they say, will give you positive effects: passion and fulfillment. But too much gives sadness and frustration, irritability and impatience. It’s uncontrollable; maybe I accidentally find too much. Maybe seeing it everywhere is the problem. It’s explained, but what isn’t is how to delve into the correct amount. Purple is sensitive and strong. I wonder why I am neither. [10]
  15. I keep thinking back to the back of that pigeon’s neck. They are oblivious to its existence, just playfully waddling in the sunlight to show off this magical purple shine as they turn away from you, as they walk away from you, as they fly away from you.
  16. He cannot even think of where purple exists off the top of his head because he has seen too much of it. And I have thrown too much at his heart.
  17. It’s a perfect balance I presume. Shall we imagine it or truly find it in objects? It should be surrounded by us, through objects and in nature, but we should be finding it as well. It should be perfectly placed in our home, smelled in our flowers, and seen in the sky. And it should be equally as difficult to find. Clarity. Does anyone know how to do that?
  18. That’s all he wanted to find in the purple rain. He “only wanted to see [her] laughing in the purple rain.” Why did he need to beg? Why can’t she see? Was there too dark of a purple in that storm? The rain disintegrated the clarity. Neither of them could see through the shade of purple into the clear teardrop of its stability and truth. It was too heavy of a rain, and too dark of a purple. It didn’t wash away confusion, it flooded it.
  19. So maybe he intended on making that mountain look a little purple. Maybe that color was the only way to make the distance look clear. Purple does not make any sense. It’s a color of clarity, but it’s nearly unreachable laid down on top of those mountains. He placed it there with his very own brush, but we will never be able to get ours to reach it.
  20. Regardless of being in the middle of red and blue, it has its own bias. It has its own fake quality to it. It tricks you; it makes you chase it around to find happiness. Perhaps only perfection can reach this balance of purple in life, so how can we humans reach it? By painting it there? By seeing it on the ground? By listening to it? It will tease you all your life, telling you that you are closer and closer to the clarity and fulfillment it gives. And then you will get too close, or imagine it too much, and it will simply downpour and flood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

 

Georgette Gouveia, “Café La Fondita inspired by a taste for Travel,” Wag Magazine, November 2016, 86.

 

Jonathan Pasquarella in discussion with the author, November 2016.

 

“Purple.” Color Psychology. Accessed November 28, 2016. http://www.colorpsychology.org/purple/.

 

Revolution, Prince And the. “Purple Rain.” Genius. 2013. Accessed November 28, 2016. http://genius.com/Prince-and-the-revolution-purple-rain-lyrics.

 

Royal Regency Hotel. Advertisement. Wag Magazine, November 2016.

 

Shrek. Directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson. Performed by Mike Myers. USA: Dreamworks, 2001. DVD.

 

“The 1975-Somebody Else (Official Video). YouTube video, 8:30, posted by The1975Vevo, July 7th, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bimd2nZirT4.

 

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 29 in. x 36 ¼ in.,
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

Yurcaba, Josephine B. “Purple Politics Is A Brand-New Political Newsletter That Wants To Empower You – Just In Time For 2016.” Bustle. Accessed November 28, 2016. https://www.bustle.com/articles/98478-purple-politics-is-a-brand-new-political-newsletter-that-wants-to-empower-you-just-in-time.

 

 

 

 

[1] Royal Regency Hotel. Advertisement. Wag Magazine, November 2016.

[2] Shrek. Directed by Vicky Jenson and Andrew Adamson. Performed by Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz. USA: Dreamworks, 2001. DVD.

[3] “The 1975-Somebody Else (Official Video). YouTube video, 8:30, posted by The1975Vevo, July 7th, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bimd2nZirT4.

[4] Revolution, Prince And the. “Purple Rain.” Genius. 2013. Accessed November 28, 2016. http://genius.com/Prince-and-the-revolution-purple-rain-lyrics.

[5] Yurcaba, Josephine B. “Purple Politics Is A Brand-New Political Newsletter That Wants To Empower You – Just In Time For 2016.” Bustle. Accessed November 28, 2016. https://www.bustle.com/articles/98478-purple-politics-is-a-brand-new-political-newsletter-that-wants-to-empower-you-just-in-time.

[6] Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, oil on canvas, 29 in. x 36 ¼ in., Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[7] Georgette Gouveia, “Café La Fondita inspired by a taste for Travel,” Wag Magazine, November 2016, 86.

[8] “The 1975-Somebody Else (Official Video). YouTube video, 8:30, posted by The1975Vevo, July 7th, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bimd2nZirT4.

[9] Jonathan Pasquarella in discussion with the author, November 2016.

[10] “Purple.” Color Psychology. Accessed November 28, 2016. http://www.colorpsychology.org/purple/.

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