ROY G BIV: Color Coded Journal (2012-2016) Excerpts

by Ania Mroczek

RED

Soft red rain.

We walk into the cold. -20 something, we walk onto the gondola, several are lit with green or red lights; we receive blankets, it is cold, so cold, and when we leave the lit up station, all falls dark.

Reddened child-birches swayed obnoxiously on the wisp of wind, as if to assert themselves to you, to make it known that they grow, and it is their reddened trunks and their loose twigs that swing back and forth along the horizon line.

Slightly obscuring it all is a red crane, and I wonder how could anyone allow cranes, those bent steel fingers, to obscure wild horizon. Sin, unpardonable sin.

We see the blood fall between her legs, and drop into the water, coloring the bluish water, red.

I looked outside and there was this terribly stunning sunset: red sprawled all over the valley, the mountainsides, peaks in a bluish glow, brushed through the clouds. But why is it that we assume beauty to be good?

ORANGE

This feeling would continue throughout the week. I felt it yesterday, as we were driving back from Squamish, from visiting V. The dark water of the Sound blackened itself against the mountain horizon, and the pale orange sinking sun flamed beneath equally darkening clouds, suspended just there, just for a minute, fleeting, blazing across the horizon like a wound.

Road Closed: a man in an orange vest, holding a stop sign, asked us where we were going, Brandywine Falls, J told him, and we drove on. Music in the car, Sylvia Plath on my lap, occasionally flipping through the pages, watching J drive the slippery road, watching electricity towers devastate the landscape, take all its wilderness, all its agony, all its supernatural rites away—subduing them with that gentle but terrible lull of civilization, of men.

They changed the time and now there is more light. It’s good no doubt but I feel I cannot bear the change, the burden of winter, coming on. The tree before our balcony has already lost half of its little meagre, orange-ish leaves. What will I do when the other half goes? Who will I be then?

YELLOW

The grayish yellowish sky reminds me of fall, of the drab and desolation that life must be after those whom you love fall away, and all that is left is your own self and your indifference to life, that haunting drift of being constantly astray, constantly aware of your own insignificance, of your otherness to the others around you.

All of a sudden days drag on, the sky is empty, the trees still bare, yellowish leaves droop their hands and swirl astray, down, down, they run— and out of the sky. When I was coming back to summer, I did not expect this.

GREEN

I should write but all I do is sit at my desk and masturbate, facing the green chestnuts, the blackening sky, electricity groans through my clitoris.

Then the wooden snowy lookout, gazing forward nothing but a steep rock wall and trees but then to the right: furious water, throwing itself down from the little forest stream, becoming menace, becoming sure death, seventy meters down into a bluish-green pool flecked with snow. Magnetic, fearful.

There are plants everywhere, everything is green by the big half-circle window. There is also a little pipe of water coming through, as if a waterfall, and Grandpa placed one of the plants so that the water would have to stream over its leaves. I am touched by this. I cannot look away, I feel my grandfather there, I remember to tell him: “I love you, I love you more than anything, and although I cannot be with you, I care for you more than anything, and I am sorry, sorry, sorry.” I don’t know how much he hears, I almost cannot see him, its as though he is there sitting or standing, slightly baffled, unable to understand what I’m saying, but somehow I feel he also knows: death is coming.

BLUE

I saw this great orange tree outside, the leaves slowly falling, and the sky was of rain, the dark masses swirling into light shades of blue, and I started to cry, because in that moment I was alive.

Back to yesterday (it is Sunday today, gray, mountains peer out in blue beneath the rising curtain cloud), we did absolutely nothing intelligent all day, apart from reading Ferrante, we watched the stupidest most brainwashing show, but somehow it felt good—to do nothing.

The clouds so low, so thick and white, and dark blue with storm and rain, thickening air. Heat hangs in the air, makes your body dissolve, atoms disassociate, wanting to become something else—the air, the clouds, the riverbed.

His hilarious laugh, his blue blue eyes. I have never wanted blue. But now I do, it’s all I want.

We stopped for a picnic though I was not hungry, the bathroom smelled of piss, I peed in the field ditch, the pale grasses against the blue bruised sky.

I am sitting on the terrace, watching the blue mountains, the rosy cloud drift mid-valley, I am watching dusk fall and I feel a change in myself. I follow the curves of the mountainside with my eyes and recognize their slope in myself, I desire freedom more than anything. I want to be free, I want to dance around the fire, and chant, and sing ancient woman songs, there is that primordial want in me, there is that fierce force of creation which demands expression. Now.

I wish I could feel something towards it. No, not love. That has become impossible. But this, this state of indifference, of blue-bird mornings and sunsets all ablaze.

INDIGO

Newton first to study light, split up sunlight into colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo + violet.

VIOLET

A bird flew up from the violet lupine fields.

It is so strange writing here, for myself, the day is falling, yawning away, the sky is pale blue, clouds a hue we do not have words for—perhaps grayish with tints of violet, but I feel I would see more if I had the word for it.