when pink collided with black, it left stains of maroon

Recently, I have started to develop a quiet liking for blood. Only the colour, I meant.

This realisation came to me as an amusing and slightly bewildering discovery, after a routine health check-up that required a blood sample of mine. Amidst the tingling pain of the needle, I found myself admiring the rich, deep red colour of my blood. It looks uniform from afar, but you can see the hues up close. And blood changes tones depending on the level of oxygen it has at any given time. Not many things in nature share this property, now, do they?

As a child, I remember accompanying my dad to meat shops and being terrified of blood stains everywhere: on the knives that the butchers used, on their outfits, and on some old ragged piece of cloth, with stains as old as the age of their shop, which they used to clean the newer stains. The younger me would try not to look at that blood closely. Something about my reserves of knowledge associated blood with death, slaughter (as it actually was), and destruction. Also, old blood leaves a rather discomforting odour that naturally makes most people want to distance themselves from it. And I’d wait for their business to get over while staring at the street outside the shop.

My favourite colour has always been pink, since the earliest memory that I hold of myself. A back-to-school bag, a new sports shoe, a handbag, or just a set of casual lounge pants: my eyes have always scanned for available shades of pink that I can pick from. It just felt the closest to who I am. They say colours speak to you; if pink was speaking to me, it was definitely in the form of a seductive siren, like that of a mermaid. Oh, and sure did I love her voice.

But now that mermaid has gone silent. She doesn’t lure me that often. I see a pink object, and I find it cute but not my type. I probably don’t even like being portrayed as cute anymore. Pink can make you feel youthful, but also incredibly vulnerable. Some colours just make people adore you, see you as something fragile, to be protected.

Others, like earth green, feel refreshing, like a cool breeze grazing your face. Then there’s the colour of the sky, light blue, the colour of hope. Also there’s black, the one that speaks the language of dominance and class, of self-sufficiency.

But the colour that I have fallen in love with lately is closer to the colour of blood but further from the colour of a red rose. It’s like a colour that was born when happy tones of pink got fused with a few but heavy, concentrated drops of sober black. The blandness of black stripped away the sweetness of the pink. The pink gave its dramatic, childlike hue to stern black. Along the way, the mixture got rusted, with some browning here and some gloomy red there, rising to form a royal deep maroon.

And this colour, rather the amalgamation of many colours, is what feels closer to what I am becoming now.

The pink walls of my bedroom and the pink-themed curtains remind me of the old me, but they don’t strike a chord with the current me. It feels like I am hanging on to some past version that I’ve long outgrown, scared of new territories and clinging to the familiar. This may just seem like a choice of colour, which isn’t a big deal, but it’s a lot deeper than that on a closer look.

I realise now that you don’t have to start a new business, move out of town, or enter into a new relationship to be the one taking more “risks”.

Maybe you just need to take the risk to accept a change within yourself. A change from what you’ve lived and known all your life. And if the changing tides of life don’t shift your identity, then what exactly are they doing, after all?