two can win at this game.

alright, so there's this three year old who ate a little too much sugar at school today. his hands were shaking through out the day, but he chose to marvel instead of inquire. by two his mother was done with work and had picked him from the daycare, and by two fifteen he had managed to finish telling her everything he'd found conversationworthy about his day. when he went inside, he kissed her hand and ran to his room, shutting the door and pulling out his coloring books. he hopped on the bed and tried to reach for the tallest shelf to grab his favorite crayola box, the 200 box. his fingers swiped it but couldn't seem to hold a grip, and the box came tumbling down. the colors spilled out, and the three year old's hands went flying to his mouth. he jumped off of his bed and tried to pick them up off of his carpet, wondering how to explain the tiny dots that had accumulated in some places. he worked through the pinks because he knew that the box was color coordinated, and by the time he'd reached the grey's he knew that the scale was almost over. he was almost done. he looked at the few crayons left, they were all shades that led to the charcoal black he'd already placed in the furthest right corner of the back row of the box. the three year old glanced at the other colors and ran his eyes along them, scanning the difference between pink and red. violet and indigo. slate and sand. he wondered if other people saw the colors in the same way that he did, and he glanced up at the colored piece of paper that was hanging above his bed. he'd done it at pre school a few weeks ago, and had colored one shade of green on to a different shaded green piece of paper. he couldn't quite make out the drawing, just the change in color. somuchgreen, he thought. somuchgreen and such a waste of beauty. imagine all the blues i could've used. and the three year old apologized to the blues. to the greys. to the oranges and yellows and random shades between brown and dark blues and light blacks that people could sometime confuse with one another. he apologized for not taking them seriously enough. he wondered again if people ever saw the colors the same that he did. if his slate was someone else's slate and if there was more than just a label on a crayon. "what if my slate is my dad's purple but this crayon's simply named slate so that either of us who look at it can know?" he wondered what it would like to be color blind. he wondered how anyone ever managed to pick a favorite color.

he finished picking up the box and went downstairs to apologize to his mother for the tiny spots on his carpet. she kissed his forehead and took his hand, but he politely slipped it away from her grasp. "i'm sorry, mom. but i've got to go outside. i've got a lot of apologizing to a lot of awful pretty things to do. do you know how often pretty things are looked over? i'm awful awful sorry."


yeah, do you know how often pretty things are looked over? not new haircuts or lowcut outfits or vehicles or anything else that man has created. not even man itself. do you how often truly beautiful things are looked over? go outside and watch a butterfly land on a rock. does the rock scare it away? no. they are completely seperate and unproductive to one another, and yet they manage to get along. we share entire beliefs and personal philosophies and yet find ways to kill one another. a butterfly can sit on a rock, but we can't even sit next to each other on a bus.