A third colour that hadn't been invented yet

David was on the phone with his mom this evening and she asked him who he thinks David is. He started with the easy scaffolding — son, brother — and then, somewhere along the way, slipped into third person. Started narrating childhood David like a character in a book. The kid whose favourite colour was blue.

Except blue wasn't really it. Blue was the answer because David supported Chelsea and the playground demanded a response to what's your favourite colour? and Chelsea blue had at least a defensible logic to it. It was a colour with a reason, which felt close enough to a colour with feeling.

Orange feels like heartburn. Yellow sort of does too but in a less brazen way.

Pink was off limits for boys at the time. Purple maybe too. He thinks now, looking back, that one of those might have actually been the answer — that had the playground zeitgeist permitted it, he might have settled into pink or purple and felt something like fulfilled. But he isn't even sure that's true. The real shape of the dissatisfaction was something else.

I was longing for a colour that didn't exist yet. A third colour that we hadn't seen yet. That colour would've been my favourite colour.

Most kids pick one and move on. David, apparently, was already intuiting that the menu was wrong — that the real answer might be something nobody had bothered to show him yet. He didn't have the language for it then. He had Chelsea blue, which was at least a colour with a reason behind it, and he had a vague sense that the question deserved a better answer than any of the available ones.

He told his mom all of this in third person, which is its own thing.