We learn what they are only by living them. Briefly free of our deaths the sky is the pale green of cologne as it evaporates. Or as we sit with boredom to reach its other side, a 1950s beige gains more desaturated purple, growing solid and majestic, a maroon as big as one of those big cars and traveling, traveling. Who of us, having a sudden insight, has not been in the presence of clear aquamarine and tried to close our hand on it, only to see it congeal into a mildly nauseous gray-yellow? I orange you, with flickers of blue, you pink me in shades from embarrassment to salmon. I so pencil lead gray and ash for the world these days, with undertones here of green dropping quickly to black, there of us lavender's light-as-air mockery.
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. Recent work appears or is pending in Paper Boats, Book of Matches, Brief Wilderness, Abandoned Mine, Soul Forte Journal. Older work is Gay Fairy Tales (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) and Gay Fairy and Folk Tales (Faber and Faber, 1997).
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