Dear Yellow,

Is there a difference between Yellow and gold? The German flag is supposed to be red, black, and gold, but I can’t look at it without feeling the mutable nausea kept within its Yellow. Yellow that replaced the white. The Romanian flag too, even as its blue and red stripes glow, is made veil by the blotch of Yellow that divides them. Yellow wallpaper, yellow rooms, and yellow flags harbinge weakness. What about Yellow leaves?

As the season demands, the Yellow is flayed from the roots of the leaves, brittle brown bones fall like excrement to the dirt. But when the leaves do their final waltz, keeping time with the wind, playing between shards of sunlight, is Yellow not a happy color?

The color of dandelions and sandcastles, sundresses and solar winds. The color of sweet honey.

The color at the core of my blond hair and the streaks that flow through it at the end of bright summers. Streaks which will some day, sooner than I can know, turn to grey and be bleached of all color into frail whiteness.

The color of singing canaries destined to choke in an underground cage on black air for the sake of freeing some stones from the rock. Yell-ow. The color of yelling and screaming, of ows and suffering.

Trapped in a smoky club, consumed by the cacophony of strangers, Yellow is the color flashing through my heart when someone pushes me. Yellow is the color burning through my neck, daring me to take a swing at the uglier man. Not red, which wants to burn him, or black, that will melt him into nothingness. Yellow is the color calling out for the taste of the iron in your blood, oozing from a busted lip, for the helpless strangulation of a punch to the gut, and for the hammering bliss of quiet behind a strike to the temple.

Yellow is the color of Cain and the guilty. Yellow is the color of mistakes and the stench of rotting corpses. No yellow is not happy, but without it, there would be no joy. Without Yellow, there would be no tomorrow.

Yellow is better than posh gold, and it’s shallow drive for success. Yellow is better than grey steel, who knows nothing but the rigid strength of isolation. Whenever I hear Alex Chilton sing “November boys got it bad”, I think of topaz. The hideous gem that will always be mine, the birthstone for those of us born in empty Novembers. I hate that stone. I hate that it is mine. I hate that I can’t choose another. I hate that Yellow was written on my birth certificate the day I was born, and I hate that it will shine through the crow’s feet, which will lengthen around my eyes. Eyes that, though blue and green, are tainted by flakes of Yellow.

But my hate is full. It is brimming with the colors of spring, just as the Yellow leaves I trample while running, decomposing into the chilled muck of the almost empty trail, will be awoken, with luck, as hues of Green.

Green that may one day be Yellow, but until then, can dance in the breeze.

-Casey