Blue Valentine

<3 love, heartbreak, blue things, Maggie Nelson, etc.

The world does nothing but reinvent itself but blue is unchanging, steady in a stormy churn.

Blueberries are not blue, but secretly purple. Sometimes red on the inside, split and running into the bowl, or crushed on thumb pads. Pressed, leaking. There is yellow and green, too. Seeds in the mash.

Blackberries are a secret blue. We call it black-purple because of its depth of pigment but it’s blue. A clustered, deep mystery.

Blue is masculine. Blue is feminine. Blue is a young mother and an old grandfather. Blue is clean bathtub water and sea glass, sometimes the sea itself. When blue embraces you, it opens wide for a swallow. Like me, it cannot help but engulf what it loves.

2.

“And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling. under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.” - Bluets, Maggie Nelson

When I talk about soulmates I don’t know what to say except that there are probably many people in the world capable of loving you well and forever. I don’t want to believe in singular destinies. I’d rather be chosen; one of a million.

The question that haunts me is not whether we are made for each other, but whether we are made for ourselves. Whether personal care and constraint are sustainable without some measure of self-absorption. We have so much love to give, and yet it never seems to reach inward. We remain stubborn. Repellant.

As oil on water, self-love sits atop, untouched. Mingled pride and shame bungle the whole bag. Could blue abound inside me? Or is it meant to live beyond, all around? Is blue only a gift we can give to one another?

Blue is a hand extended to eternity, asking, is this enough?

3.

“But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it?” - Bluets

The truth is I didn’t love Bluets at first. I had given up on blue at the time. I had given up on longing, though that’s not quite the right word. I had given up on feeling, I suppose.

I wanted to love and then I wanted to leave. I don’t regret my choices and faults, but I wish I had been kinder in my choosing. I’m sorry to have left so many times only to return, hands outstretched. Encircled so many things only to give up the good stuff.

Blue, I still don’t know how I could deserve you. You are the only thing I’d like to possess.

4.

“The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.” - Bluets

My eyes have always held more shadow than pigment. As a child, I wanted azure in me, injected. But you cannot hunt blue, only hoard it.

I’ve purchased loads of blue. From my phone to my credit card to dish set to my couch to my rug to books to sheets to my frying pan, I’ve barricaded myself in it like a doomsday prepper.

“Pigmentless,” I wrote in the margins, “does not mean colorless. But something, however, has sapped it of life. When pigment disappears there is only light and shadow.”

Don’t bother searching for love in piles of grey.

5.

Roy Orbison sings on “Blue Angel”:

“Oh, blue angel / Don’t you cry just because he said goodbye. Oh, blue angel / Have no fear, brush away lonely teardrops. Well, love's precious flame can just burn in vain. But you're not to blame. You thought love was a game, is it? Oh, such a shame but don't you cry, don't sigh. I’ll tell you why, I'll never say goodbye / Blue angel."

He seems to misunderstand his girl, mistaking the blue as emanating from her. Blue lives in the space or closeness between people. In heartbreak, it floats around, sticking just above one’s head.

6.

“Blue Monday” by New Order never uses the word “blue,” though its cover art has a large blue ring encircling smaller colorful rings, an orange spot in the center. It paints blue as a symptom of separation and loneliness.

“I see a ship in the harbor. I can and shall obey / But if it wasn't for your misfortune, I’d be a heavenly person today… I thought I told you to leave me / While I walked down to the beach. Tell me, how does it feel / When your heart grows cold?”

Blue Monday is said to be the unhappiest day of the year. Using pseudo-scientific metrics like debt accumulation, weather, broken resolutions, and Christmas hangover, Blue Monday generally lands on the third week of January.

The song was later repurposed for a Sunkist commercial. The lyrics were changed:

“How does it feel / When a new day has begun? / When you're drinking in the sunshine / Sunkist is the one.”

7.

On the same album, Substance, New Order has a song called “Everythings Gone Green”:

“Help me, somebody, help me. I wonder where I am. I see my future before me. I’ll hurt you when I can / It seems like I've been here before… Confusion sprung up from devotion / A halo that covers my eyes. It sprung from this first estrangement / No one have I ever despised. Is this the way that you wanted to pay?”

Green, here, is not a marker of life, but death. It is a last plea before the draining. Before grey overruns everything.

8.

Will other colors someday leak and mar blue’s simple purity? When spots appear on my favorite color like sun marks, should I stare at the spot as a hypnotist, willing out the center of my vision so blue engulfs the eye? I don’t want to have to trick blue just to keep it mine.

Blue cannot love me in the way I have asked. Just as black never appears when I need it most. These are colors that don’t like to be chased. So unlike the easy ones: green, yellow, white. Those knock on my window every day. They have so many forms, so many variations formulating in near reach but I have never loved the easy thing.

9.

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.” - Bluets

Blue is black in an eclipse. I forgot to say last time. Blue like the moon and California depression. Blue like the second day of Los Angeles rain. Blue is scorpion grass on the highway. Hydrangeas on the Northshore. Irises in the grocery store.

Blue is my telephone screen in the middle of the night lighting up with missed calls. Blue says I’ve been a neglectful friend. I’m sorry, I say. Kiss it and promise to be better.

Blue is Derek Jarman’s film from 1993. The spaceship hotel room in Blue Valentine. Gena Rowland’s sweater as she dances in A Woman Under the Influence. Martin Sheen’s denim and Sissy Spacek’s button-down in Badlands. Joni Mitchell’s best song. An on-set polaroid for Kids.

10.

The quanta we perceive as “blue" is an interpretation of light (re: particles). Sometimes, it makes me think the sky is just a sky. An absence of matter.

11.

“There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no ‘color thermometers.’ How could there be, as ‘color knowledge’ always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver? This didn’t stop a certain Horace Bénédict de Saussure, however, from inventing, in 1789, a device he called the ‘cyanometer,’ with which he hoped to measure the blue of the sky.” - Bluets

On warm days, the sun seems to swell into the air and coat the world in orange. I take orange for granted—often appearing without being called as if it is my best friend coming to stay for a month-long sleepover. If it were not for an excess of orange, I don’t think blue would haunt me quite so much. It’s balance that I crave. Color is chemical. So is love, I’m told.

12.

Blue is the notebook in which I wrote:

I have flawed and sinned as people do. It happens all the time. But there is no snake beneath my skin, no infection which could make me less worthy of love, of living. Eden when blue is here—when I drive home fast before the blue passes and the words become unknowable again. I chase blue into bedrooms, down the bottle, into shopping carts and celluloid. Blue, here, here, Blue. Blue tomorrow, tomorrow promises. I was never made of slithering creatures. You and I are made of salt, like earth and sea and blood and cooking water. I have danced, careful and sweet, with blue on my mind.

13.

It is a gift to be loved in equal measures as loving. The best gift, maybe. I would say loving has brought the blue, but the blue has always existed, burrowed everywhere like ancient fossils. I’m only just now seeing.