The Color of Imagination

By Peter Bowden

He said it once, almost as an afterthought, the way men say things they don’t yet understand: you are the color of my imagination. It surprised him as soon as it left his mouth. He had known colors his whole life, the blue of work shirts drying on a line, the brown of river water after rain, the hard white of winter mornings, but this was different. This color had no name. It lived somewhere behind his eyes, where memory softened its edges and hope warmed it just enough to glow.

When she entered a room, the air changed. Not loudly. Just enough. Like sunlight sliding across a wooden floor in late afternoon. She carried shades of things he’d forgotten he loved; the gold of dust in old books, the green of fields seen from a moving car, the faint red of embers when a fire is almost done but not finished speaking. She was not one color but many, layered and shifting, as imagination always is when it’s honest. He realized then that imagination wasn’t escape; it was recognition.

At night, alone with his thoughts, he tried to picture her clearly and couldn’t. She resisted sharp outlines. She was watercolor, not ink. She was the space between stars where wishing still feels possible. And he understood, finally, what he’d meant. Not that she was imagined, but that she gave his imagination its palette. Before her, the world had been serviceable and true. After her, it was suddenly, unmistakably alive.

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