A Shield and a Confession (Notes on the Color Pink)

My obsession with the color took over my whole life. Pink charger, pink roses, pink notebooks, pink computer case, pink highlighters, pink pencils, pink birthday candles.

2023 was the year of pink because it was the year of Barbie; but for me 2017 was the year of pink because I became infatuated with a knockoff pink iPhone charger. I was working as a florist at the time, coming home with dried petals crushed in my pockets, back tight from washing endless black buckets. Every shift I would clock in, process flowers, make arrangements, pack them into boxes and load them into a van shrink wrapped with the branding of the artisanal market I worked for. Then I would drive around the city delivering them.

Delivering flowers sounds idyllic, but it meant my physical job as a florist was punctuated by long stretches on the road in which I had a lot of time to contemplate my life choices, like why I was 26 and working at a glorified grocery store, or if I wanted kids, or if I was a real artist, or whether I should cut my hair and if my acne was ever going to clear up. I also often found myself on tight neighborhood roads winding up the west hills of Portland where I would have to make a 10 point turn to get myself out of a dead end.

One delivery day when my phone was about to die I pulled into the parking lot of a Fred Meyer. My phone being on the brink of death was a common occurrence and even though I had lived in Portland for eight years by 2017, I definitely needed Google maps to get anywhere.

For whatever reason I was compelled to pull a hot pink phone charger out of the knock-off charger bin, instead of a white one. Which doesn’t really seem like an important thing to note except that in 2017 I was kind of afraid of color. (In a very Kinfolk-y Scandi minimalism fear of color way.) Now I’m sitting in my studio wearing a hot pink sweater with a grid of hot pink paintings on the wall in front of me. I’m not afraid of color anymore.

I think I needed that shock of pink seven years ago to set off a cascade of dominoes falling that I owe many things to—namely my divorce and a cross country move. I needed the kind of color that you can’t ignore. In fact in an old studio notebook there’s a spread with a line between the word “pink” and the phrase “can’t ignore”

My obsession with the color took over my whole life. Pink charger, pink roses, pink notebooks, pink computer case, pink highlighters, pink pencils, pink birthday candles. But more than the pink objects, it was the intangibles that dug their grip into me: the pink blush of desire, the neon pink of the sun coming through closed eyelids, the rotting pink camellias that carpet the ground in Portland every spring.

A poem written in November of 2018 reads:

The sunset through my open window
Clouds pinking and pinking
Fluffy totems

And your voice on the phone
On speaker
Nestled on my chest
(You nestled on my chest)

The sky pink
My blush pink
Everything pink

Something about the unmistakeable girl-ness¹ of hot pink was something I adored in those years. Like shouting: I want this!!! as loud as I could. When I moved into my tiny little studio apartment, all alone, I bought myself pink sheets and pink towels and pink throw pillows. I wrapped myself in the towels after baths and looked at my little city from my third story windows, my bed taking up the entire room that now housed my whole life. Pink was a shield and a confession. I’m strong, I want this, I’m scared.

Pink was also a vivid white-hot pain. Ligaments being pulled apart, all of my longings contradicting each other. Grief and growth in equal measure. Pink like new scar tissue, pink like the indentations your fingernails make on the skin of your palm, pink like the inside of me.

I left the grocery store and went to work at a boutique flower shop. Every morning I biked to work, drank my coffee, processed flowers. After work, I went to my studio where I carved a pink salt block into the shape of a cup.² My obsession with the color pink was getting tangled with my obsession with cups and salt. I made a lot of things with my hands. I dated, fell in love, slept with new people, had my heart broken. I grieved and I grew.

In 2019, I attempted to write a poem about arranging flowers. The end of which reads:

And sometimes I fuck it up,
pick the wrong shade of pink
and have to begin again
But even knowing something is wrong
is its own sort of muscle memory

Even knowing something is wrong is its own sort of muscle memory. I didn’t know what my body knew when I bought that knockoff pink iPhone charger. I didn’t know what previously unimaginable futures I would live through. The hearts I would break, the ways I would be cracked open and changed. I didn’t know. But something pulled me to it, something inside of me chose it.

Now I sit with my cursor blinking hot pink in front of every word I write. I am profoundly grateful for color, and all of the ways it shows me the things I can’t—don’t want to—ignore.

xo,

B

1. Of course, color isn’t inherently tied to any gender, but I think we can all agree that in our current society hot pink is most commonly associated with femininity.

2. I eventually finished my strange salt sculpture, which you can see here.