purple: a love letter
an ode to my longest and silliest obsession
happy random day off on a thursday! i can’t say i’m enthusiastically pledging allegiance to the united states these days, but i do pledge allegiance to a number of other things: brat summer, chocolate chip cookies, the buc-ee’s beaver statue, chicken caesar wraps, walkable cities, actual liberty and justice for all… my list of passions great and small is endless, babe!
the positive side of mixing red, white, and blue is that it results in one of my greatest passions of all: purple! if you have met me for maybe five seconds, you know that my dedication to my favorite color borders on concerning. i stand by this. 🎶so go and tell your friends that i’m obsessive and crazy… that’s fine… i’ll tell mine…🎶 you have no taste!
my brilliant friend
wrote a gorgeous treatise on green in her last newsletter and i want to shout her out and thank her for inspiring me generally but also for inspiring me specifically to write about my lifelong love for purple. read her post here and subscribe to her substack, good salt:
and an additional thank you to literal icon maggie nelson for providing the prompt that guides this piece:
‘Compose an ode to your favorite color as a numbered list. Free associate; see what stories, images, or memories the color evokes. If you can, try to stretch your list to thirteen.’
there are those who see their favorite color as an arbitrary question and those who see it as a talisman, a good-luck charm, a way of seeing and being. i’m the latter, obviously.
i have questioned my discernment many times but i’ve never questioned my love for purple. while blue, pink, and green have jostled for second-favorite over the years, purple has sat on the throne, filing her nails. she knows she has nothing to prove.
the obsession centers on wanting to be purple, most days: luxe, magical, spiritual. one time someone told me my aura was green and i was reassured this was a good thing but i found myself staring out the window of the uber and wondering, am i not purple enough?
purple is clarity. a cleansing exhale. a crystal clutched in a tight fist. sparkles spackled in the inner corners of the eyes. the kind of purple i crave is bold and soft— none of that one-note, diluted, mauve-y stuff.
the best purple, my favorite favorite, is a bright, almost neon lavender, one that captures the gaze and doesn’t let go. nothing is more pleasing to the eye or the soul. it’s a shimmery, esoteric hypnosis. no wonder Purple People love to shellac our whole lives with it.
when i was little i (allegedly) refused to wear any other color. this is a story that’s only been told to me secondhand, but it checks out. almost every photo of me in the early 00’s has me draped in shades of violet and grape with a blunt-bangs bob and a wide-eyed smile. anna wintour could never, i fear!
my twenty-first birthday party theme was “power purple”. upon entrance i anointed everyone— even the stragglers who didn’t obey the theme— with two swipes of purple glitter on each of their cheeks. most of my friends weren’t old enough to go to the bars, but why would i want to be at Kid Rock’s Rockin’ Racist Adventure or whatever on the busiest street in nashville when i could be There, in that living room, holding my friends and swaying to “somebody to love”? party of the century, if you ask me. i get a little thrill that people still talk about it from time to time. big purple aura points.
i want to note that the “signature cocktail” (punch bowl) from said party, a deep, eggplant-colored recipe plucked from pinterest, was a chaotic mix birthed from blue curacao and god knows what else. none of us can remember. what we do recall is that the drink was so strong we had to tell people to add a “1 mississippi, 2 mississippi” count of water to their glass to dilute it before they sipped. thank god i didn’t throw up purple that night. (can i tell you a secret? i would’ve still loved her just the same. another: ugly purple things are still beautiful to me. especially when they come on too strong.)
even the name of it turns so sweetly in the mouth: purple. pur-ple. the etymology derives from the greek porphura, which was a (purple! duh!) dye derived from snail mucus. tres chic.
a short list of naturally occurring purple things i love: orchids, wisterias, lilacs, lavender, weird sea slugs, hydrangeas, crushed-up blackberries, raw amethyst, ube
a longer list of man-made purple things i love: my record player, most of my blankets, my favorite muji pen, the vase i found for $1 at goodwill, the lavender conversation pit i saw in a tv show once and haven’t stopped thinking about, the jumpsuit i dyed for the eras tour, the liquid lipstick i used to wear to APUSH at 8am (i love high school me for taking bold swings), my toaster, the susan alexandra bag i got for an insane deal on depop, every photo someone has sent me with something purple captioned to the tune of “thought of you”
sometimes when i’m feeling woo-woo i call on my older self for guidance. she is almost always wearing a lavender caftan in my mind’s eye. i don’t know if i want to be a mother, but i know i want to be a grandmother. a neighborhood character. a pillar of my community. a soft place to land. someday i will water my purple flowers in front of my purple home with a wrap-around porch, white hair dyed with the same shock of arctic fox purple rain i used to spruce up my college hair-model balayage job, and my neighbors will say you know calista, the purple lady? i consider becoming a local legend a Serious Career Goal.
so maybe it is an arbitrary line on a list of surface-level get-to-know-you-questions, but it’s also one of the longest relationships i’ll ever be in. isn’t that worth something?
I love this SO much. Wow. I always think of you when I see cutie purple things ;)
oh wow Calista this was so lovely to read!!!! "purple is clarity. a cleansing exhale. a crystal clutched in a tight fist." gorgeous