- The song “Bruises” by Chairlift reminds me of a really strange wishy washy floating through space time. I think I liked that song in 6th grade either when dad was in the hospital or the summer after he died. I had to have mom approve the song before I bought it with my iTunes gift card because she’s overprotective and approved all of my music to make sure it was appropriate for my young ears. Whenever I listen to that song now, it gives me a strange wistful feeling, but I can’t pinpoint any specific memory that triggers this feeling. Bruises are black and blue but they are also lavender.
- Lavender is my mom’s favorite flower and scent. She loves lavender in her scone mix from Williams Sonoma that we give her every Mother’s Day along with a little bundle of lavender sprigs. She likes it in her bath too. I’m very decidedly a city girl, but smelling my mom’s lavender bath and her lavender scones makes me long for a white country home, picket fence and all. My mom could have her loom and I could have my oven with a latched door and the whole house would smell like honey.
- When my parents announced that my sister was going to be born, they also asked for my room. “The baby will need that space, but you can have the bigger room! And you can paint it any color you want!” I chose yellow. Because yellow is opposite from purple on the color wheel and I wanted to stubbornly prove that I didn’t need the purple room. But whenever I woke up and realized in my new room, I realized my walls were piss yellow and that my family was no longer the cute and perfect and symmetrical family of four it once was.
- Lavender feels like a sob caught up in the back of my throat. A bruise. A blemish. The feeling when you’re about to cry but you just can’t get the cry out.
- It feels like a haze. It’s like when you try to put two magnets together but they oppose each other and there’s this unsettling orb of energy in between the magnets. All of my memories are trapped in that orb.
- Seeing lavender in a dream means that success and relaxation are in your future. Receiving lavender is a good omen. Lavender is superstitious. I almost wouldn’t want to receive it.
- I sink into my bed, really deep into it. There are velvet pillows all around me and I can’t tell if I’m already dreaming or still living my real life. I just ate a really nice plate of salmon with some really nice herbs and some really nice rice. My furniture is all very nice. I have a candy dish in my front hall and it’s always full. I used lavender hand crème before bed. It’s probably imported from France. My husband brings me pillow mist to help me fall asleep faster. It’s also lavender. Also imported.
- My roommate said that a lot of lavender grows in France. “I have photos on my computer,” she says, showing me pictures of rows and rows of lavender fields grown in Marseilles. I’ve never been to France, but I do know what it’s like to walk down rows of flowers, letting the fuzz on the stalks tickle your legs. I remember being posed amongst budding tulips in San Francisco, hugging my brother and wiping my eyes and nose while my aunt snaps a photo. The flowers make our faces hurt, but we like it.
- Her hair smells like flowery shampoo from the salon. If she flips it, you can smell the fresh scent on her neck too. She’s sitting across the table from you and your pupils burn into hers as the oyster slips out of its shell and down her throat. Her place is clean too, the steel countertops and the toilet seat and the sheets. She’s innocent, long eyelashes fringing her eyes like trees fringe a lake. She wraps you in the blanket her grandmother embroidered and you are one, just for a fleeting moment.
- The inside of the oyster shell is iridescent, catching the light just so. It looks like the abalone necklaces on display in the Native American wing of the Portland Art Museum that shine purple and blue and silver. What’s inside the oyster is unappealing and slimy, I wonder why I got tricked into thinking it was beautiful anyway.
- “There are two types of summer; white and dark. White summers are those full of lawn and linen, the sea and soft sunshine, cherries and children’s smiles, in which you feel disconnected and light, almost floating, dreamy and distant in a haze of white dandelion fluff. You don’t ever want to land. Dark summers are honeyed and sulky, full of pomegranates, thunderstorms, magnolias and un-kept promises. Cinematic and shadowy, you exist in a trance of melancholy, and feel passionately, though feign detachment. Pandora opens the box, and lightening fills the sky.” –Elizabeth Lucy
- If a plum and a nectarine procreated, it would be a light, sweet, rich, sad lavender fruit.
- Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the only modern artists that uses pastels like lavender, sage, and yellow in her work. It doesn’t evoke fruitiness or a sort of sickly femininity, her colors are sad and mad and make you feel sort of nauseous. I imagine her taking a light purple paint, swiping it on the canvas, and then taking the murky paint water and drenching the painting.
- Why cover up a hickey when it’s the perfect and most precious mark of love? Placed on your neck and chest just for you? It’s as if someone was saying “I love you I love you I love you I love you take this piece of me with you” right into your neck.
- The night of my first kiss, my mom picked me up from the basketball game and I slid into the car avoiding eye contact. She knew. “How was the game?” she asked, trying to tease the secret out of me. “Good,” I said, looking straight at her because what was the point of hiding it anyway? “Your lips are purple, Clare.” I wiped my mouth, somehow thinking it would erase the evidence of the three minutes and 32 seconds I spent out on the streetcar tracks.
- The girls pinned me down, unbuttoning the top button of my polo shirt while tugging at my already straight hair with a straightener. “Lavender brings out the brown in your eyes,” a girl said, using the hard little brush that comes with drugstore makeup to swipe the chalky powder over my eyelids, pressing the spongy tip hard into my socket. “Now you’re ready for the dance,” they said, dragging me in front of a floor length mirror. They adjusted their tank tops and headed off to the dancefloor, where the sweat trickled down their faces and the eye shadow sparkled on my eyelids.
- Wayne Thiebaud’s pastel cakes must be so delectable in real life. I can just taste the smooth buttercream between layers of fluffy eggy cake. It’s a luxe dessert, something Marie Antoinette probably licked off her fingers late at night. “Let them eat cake,” she probably said.
- My Easter dress was a horrifyingly putrid lavender one year. I can’t remember if my brother’s Easter tie matched my Easter dress or if he got away with a plain gray suit and didn’t have to don the awful color just to please the visiting relatives. I remember how perpetually red my cheeks were from all the pinching, how dizzy my head was from all the questions, and how sore my stomach was from all of the tiramisu and roasted lamb my great uncle forced into my mouth.
- Today at work I noticed a bundle of lavender tied up with a bow on Jen’s desk. Who gave it to her? She doesn’t wear a wedding ring. Does she have a lover? Did she buy the flowers for herself? They’re dried up and falling apart but still smell so strongly.
- It reminds him of transcendentalism and it sort of reminds me of that, too. I bet Henry Thoreau sat in his cabin at Walden Pond and wrote all day and closed his eyes a lot and probably tried to keep a few buds of lavender alive in a tiny jar.
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“About Thoreau.” The Walden Woods Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2016.
Amber, Thea. “Dreams Nest.” Dreams Nest. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2016.
Frownfelter, Andrea. “Flower Symbolism as Female Sexual Metaphor.” Eastern Michigan University. N.p., 2010. Web. 05 Mar. 2016.
Star, Trembling. “Two Types of Summer.” N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2016.
