November 6, 2023 | Story by Veronica Nocera | Graphic by Matthew Cupelli
To know me is to know the color of my bedroom walls.
Not the ones in my college apartment, so plastered in torn magazine covers and fading photo booth strips and stolen Home Depot paint swatches that the beige underneath is barely an afterthought. The ones in my South Florida bedroom, where I started high school and turned 18 and drafted my graduation speech in the dead of night.
The apartment I go home to over breaks and during the summer has three bedrooms. In the five years I’ve lived there, I’ve slept in every single one.
There’s the master bedroom my mom relinquished to me when I first moved in at 13, a room I loved most for the way sunlight poured in from all the windows, casting dusty shadows over the spines that lined my bookshelves. There’s the smallest room by the front door, the one I took over when my mom got sick and needed more space. Its one window didn’t offer much light, so I grew familiar with darkness.
And then there’s the middle room, a pentagon-shaped enclave separated from the living area by a pair of sliding doors, all angles and cramped corners and harsh direct sunshine that heats the right sight of my bed in the summertime. The July before I left for college, my mom suggested I paint the walls whatever color I wanted.
It felt ironic to make such a drastic change to a room I would soon be leaving behind. Still, I accepted her offer, and for the last few nights in my not-quite-childhood bedroom, I slept surrounded by a sea of bright, dandelion yellow.
Once, I asked my mom her favorite color. I thought she’d say green — there was a jade-colored dress she sometimes pulled out on special occasions — but her answer was less definite.
“Favorite color for what?” she asked absentmindedly. “To wear? To paint my room?”
I tossed her answer around in my mind. To me, favorite colors weren’t conditional. All my best dresses were shades of yellow, and, though I didn’t know it yet, I would one day coat my walls with a similarly blinding layer of paint.
Existence, the way I do it, is a lifelong quest for the things that make me who I am. I collect hobbies and trinkets and preferences, then I lie them out in front of me, deciding — carefully, constantly — which ones matter most. The evolving essence of me.
More than atoms and molecules, the building blocks of my humanity are scattered across flaking faux leather journals, dozens of frivolous certainties recorded in fluorescent pink highlighter. By checking these archives, I can tell you that in 2010, my favorite song was “You Belong with Me,” but in 2012, I decided to choose something more obscure: a number from a Russian musical my mom passed along from her childhood. Now, it’s neither.
The walls of my first bedroom were painted a pale purple, so, naturally, purple was my first favorite color. In elementary school, well-acquainted with the 64-count crayon box, it morphed into a three-way tie between scarlet red, sky blue and lavender.
But by the end of fifth grade, my favorite color was yellow.
I saw it in the school bus that dropped me off on the corner of my complex every afternoon, a small dose of freedom I relished, and in the patches of wildflowers my mom gently weaved into crowns. It felt, inexplicably, permanent.
Even now, I can’t explain why the color drew me in the way it did. Maybe it was its unparalleled association with positivity, a nod to the childhood optimism I held onto through most of high school; or maybe I was anthropomorphizing yellow the way I did every stuffed animal and potted plant, and I saw someone eccentric but well-intentioned. Familiar.
When I slide open the doors of my closet and peer inside, waves of yellow pour out, a canary-colored collection that’s been years in the making.
Fading tangerine-tinted T-shirts share hangers with thrifted tops the color of honeycomb. A sunflower-patterned dress I’ve brought on every trip I’ve ever taken brushes against a pastel gown I’ve only put on a handful of times: at a Van Gogh exhibit, my 21st birthday, my study abroad farewell dinner in Berlin.
Flickers of yellow paint a mural in my camera roll, my happiest moments cast in an equally uplifting hue.
Tucked in the corner of my closet sits a pair of heeled marigold boots, shoes I first wore the month I turned 16, when I needed cotton balls to fill the extra space above my toes. That same year, a box bearing a set of mens size 8.5 sneakers appeared mistakenly at my dad’s doorstep, a cosmic coincidence delivered in obnoxious banana yellow. They fit perfectly.
Most days, the monochrome nature of my wardrobe is evident, a fact those I’ve known my whole life and others I’ve just met are keen to point out.
Once, at a birthday dinner, a friend’s mom looked pensively at me across the table. I was wearing a knee-length blue-grey dress.
“Every time I see you, I expect you to be wearing something yellow,” she said.
Knowing someone perceived me in that way — identified patterns, took mental notes and silently set an expectation — was comforting, yet I was stung by the sudden feeling that I had somehow let her down. I started paying closer attention when I got dressed in the morning.
To know me is to know the color of my bed sheets, my phone case, the pen-filled mug on my desk and my favorite cashmere sweater. It’s knowing my favorite flower — the sunflower — and that every year on my birthday, at least three different people buy me bouquets, rich yellow bunches that sit in emptied glass bottles on my bathroom windowsill until their wilting petals stain my floor gold.
There’s comfort in having parts of yourself you know for certain, truths that remain in focus even when the rest of the world goes spinning, spinning, spinning until everything that isn’t right in front of you starts to blur. Yellow keeps me grounded; in every universe, I feel I’d love it the same.
I don’t always know myself very well. Second-guessing comes naturally, every decision an opportunity to mark up the script of my life. I find myself frozen in the face of things that used to come naturally, staring at a blank page and willing the words to pour out.
But I know my favorite color. I see it in the uneven paint of my bedroom, the fabrics hanging in my closet and the intimate, brilliant light that bathes the world when the sun begins to set. Those things are real.