Colors
by Julia Maranhao-Wong
Winner of Zinc’s 2022 College Essay Contest
The stars pool in my eyes, settling like dust and the burden of being, for just a moment, the only girl in the world. I’ve long believed that there is something magical about the in-betweens, something otherworldly about the few moments between night and day, one place and the next, the stretch of Storrow Drive between home and Logan Airport. The turnpike stretches ahead, cutting through the city as the sky lights up with a promise the color of deep blue hydrangeas. To the left, the Charles River hugs the shore below, extending towards the horizon. The colors that play across the sky reflect in the river much as they reflect in me; just as the sunset is a beginning coloring the sky, my journey is colored by the lessons along the way.
Indigo cuts between the clouds, dripping like water at the Montessori Preschool of Sydney. In the blistering heat of Australia, I learned that liquid runs down the sides of glasses tipped by timid hands. To pour requires the water to leap, demands the bravery to tilt the glass far and fast. In the amethyst-shaded water, I was taught that success requires confidence; the bravery to speak when it is silent, stand up when it is difficult, and push the glass just far enough.
The golden light behind the clouds matches the buttercups my siblings and I would hold to our chins, the ones that grew on the sandy shores where I learned ambition. The bulbous, slimy-bodied tadpoles fled the light of the day, gracing only the in-between hours with their presence in the shallow waters. I recall awakening long before my siblings to crawl into my mother’s bed and whisper, “The sun is up, so I am up,” before grabbing my light-blue raincoat to catch my amphibious friends. Those early mornings taught me that nature favors the ambitious — but it was the evenings in which the tadpoles swam free that I learned no matter how much you love a thing, “mine” is an insidious word, and the most beautiful wonders run free.
The crimson in the sky bleeds the scarlet of my heart, from the wound my mother claims will never heal. Possibly the greatest lesson I’ve learned is the color red, from those who weaponize the word “bleeding heart” to twist empathy into a fatal flaw. The feeling of cool, tiny palms pressed against my skin in the humid climate of Brazil, reaching for the discarded toys, will always speak louder. I’ve stopped listening to those who pity my heart, because feeling means hurting and compassion is what our world needs. The fad of new-age thinking is supposed realism, with optimism disregarded as quixotic by a “superior” community. Yet hope pumps through my veins like magma, gushing out of my heart and riding every breath. It is not weak.
These colors of the sunset paint me from the inside out. I am a girl with fire in my veins and stars in my eyes, who loves questions without answers and journeys without destinations. My passion defines me, guides me, and reminds me that in a world so much larger than any one of us, the greatest accomplishment is to make impact in a short life. I carry with me the battles fought by my mother and father and the legacy of those before them, so that one day I may tilt my head towards the stars and all those who suffered to tell them their descendant is a light against the darkness they suffered.
Soon I may rise above the Charles River to shed light and color of my own — and still, like the sun, somewhere in the world I will be rising, just as my learning never truly ends. The sun rises. I watch over the water. I dream of the colors with which I shall one day paint the world.