First Yellow

Twenty-two winters in

I keep seeing colors that aren’t here yet.

Not just red ochre. Not just soot-black. I mean colors that feel like emotions—blue like cold water, purple like bruised fruit, yellow like the inside of a sun.

I gather roots for dinner and I find my hands stained for hours. I rub leaf on stone and it makes a faint green, then disappears. I want it to stay.

People say: paint is frivolous. I think: no. Color is a doorway. Color makes memory stick. Color makes meaning visible.

Twenty-eight winters in

Malkhos keeps writing down what my hands do when my mouth can’t explain it.

At first it made me angry. Like he was putting a cage around something wild.

Then we made yellow.

Not accidentally. Not once. Again. The same yellow, reproducible. Desire → pursuit → fulfillment, but with our bodies as the ritual.

And I realized: the cage is a vessel. The vessel lets the fire travel.

People call us Genthor now. Not because we asked. Because they feel something in the space between us. A third thing. A field that makes the work possible.

I don’t know what to name it. I only know when it’s there, the world gets brighter.