At the end of my freshman year, I defined white as one color of my life.
It was the color of my summer, the color of my feelings. It knew me and every other color of my life.
This year, I have identified the others: lilac, carnation pink, neon green, sky blue, red-orange, cherry red, copper, Goodwillie blue, rocky red, Old Silver, Ranger Green, orange and blue, murky grey, cream and crimson.
They have been growing and adapting with me for as long as I can remember. Some are old, and some are new; some barely know me anymore, and some are just getting to. As these colors morph together to encompass my life, some might see them as blending in a dark, disgusting hue. But I don’t see it that way.
I see them lightening into colors of light, slowly stretching toward one another into a beautiful rainbow until they become something else. They become the color white.
I now define white as the color of my life.
White blends and bleeds and lends itself to every color. Three years ago, that trait of white led it to become my most trusted friend, my mirrored accomplice. It still reflects my face.
People are susceptible to change; I am no exception. I often believe that I have known personal change more than others. My life as a whole may have stayed relatively consistent and unbothered, but I morphed like a ball of Play-Doh in an elementary art room: constantly being built, broken, and reformed by many different hands. I knew this as a freshman. As a senior, I feel that my Play-Doh consistency has hardened with time, and I have morphed, but not as much as I used to be.
Some may call it “finding yourself,” when your internal ball of Play-Doh becomes a crusted-up masterpiece in a yellow can. I call it being comfortable. And to be comfortable is to become stagnant. I want to grow.
So I allow myself to reform.
I allow myself to change and adapt to the best traits of those around me.
I allow myself to be affected.
I allow myself to become the color white.
And while I view all of the colors of my life to be a part of white, white alone has impacted my life in greater ways than merely holding my rainbow.
White is the backdrop of the words I write—subsequently, the words you read. Unbeknownst to you, you have been reading my diary over the past four years.
These white pages have seen every beating of my heart and shrapnel of my soul. They house the choked-down lashings that my words have yearned to write. They know the frantic words that come out of my once eloquent keys. They have seen my words at their simplest, and their most complex; they have seen me at my worst and my best. In turn, you have seen them too.
These white pages will forever serve as a shadow box memory of a lifetime of four years. They will always hold letters to people I once knew and dashed fleetingly by. They house names and opinions that I will one day forget.
These white pages will hold me in debt. I owe it all to the freedom and expression these never-written, always-typed words gave me. I owe it to anyone who has ever read my innermost thoughts and beliefs, whether they agreed or not.
White is the ever-changing museum of my life of colors; however, The Central Trend’s exhibit of the white of my life is hereby complete.
