The blue was always there. It just waited for a smaller hand. I used to wear that color like a cold coat, the shade of long roads and quiet water. It followed me from mirror to sea, a color I thought belonged to leaving. Then a child sat down with a box of wax and made a circle for each of us, and when I asked why every face was blue, the answer came without a thought: "Because blue is good." No explanation. No long reasoning. Just a hand moving, sure and small, turning my old sorrow into something I could finally stand inside. The color does not change. The meaning does. What was once the shade of leaving becomes the shade of staying. Blue is not sadness now. Blue is the room where we are all drawn, and no one is missing. I had spent years trying to outrun that color, or drown it, or rename it. But a child does not fight with color. A child fills the page, presses the wax down hard, and lets every face be blue, because blue is enough. Because blue is everyone. Maybe that is the whole truth: we do not need a reason to love. We only need the courage to draw the ones we love in colors we once feared. The color does not change. The meaning does. What was once the shade of leaving becomes the shade of staying. Blue is not sadness now. Blue is the room where we are all drawn, and no one is missing. No one is missing. So let the page stay blue. Let the faces bleed into one another. Let my old grief be just a color now— held by a hand that never needed a reason. The blue is still blue. But now it is home.
