The cue is a thread, one thread pulled from a multicolor tangle on the table. I take my cue seriously. Close my eyes and pull one randomly, hoping for blue or green, the colors I like best. The one I pull is neither. Instead, it’s indeterminate—a shade of brown, or is it red? Maybe something in between.

Brown is not my favorite color. Brown is mud, dry leaves, the color my hair once was.  Something dull and worn, paper aged from white to yellow to tan, now brown. Not my favorite color, but neither is red.

Red is alarm, a fire, emergency, impending disaster. Red is blood, a jagged wound, the color of searing pain. Code red—high risk; you don’t want to find yourself in the red zone. Red is fury, volatility, a tantrum, your two-year-old’s face after he screams for twenty minutes because you denied him a cookie. The angry man who says you’re not enough or maybe you’re too much.

Brown is autumn, the world turning cold, cool earth under a bed of decaying leaves. A bed that calls you at your most exhausted, when resistance is low. Don’t listen to brown; it’s the end of something, the life of a plant, or a tooth, or joy.

Red is closer to the beginning, not birth or childhood, but youth: the recklessness, the fire of desire and ambition, the wish to set your world aflame and the willingness to burn it all down in the name of what you want or what you think is right, or what they said you ought to do. Or maybe just because you can, or for no reason at all.

I lived in the red zone for a long time, or for a moment or an eon or a flash. Perhaps it was both but also neither.

Now I want cool colors, blue-green, green of the sea. To drift in the Aegean Sea. Clean, smooth, fresh. A calm sea, not flat or without ripples, but no tidal waves. Enough but not too much. I don’t need the thrill of surfing or the fear of being pulled under. I’d like to float, even if just for a little while.

Someday green will turn to brown. It always does. Brown is not my favorite color. My thread, still indeterminate, lies on the table.