What's Your Favorite Color?

“What’s your favorite color?”

            I thought hard about my answer. It was important. What color was mine? “Yellow,” I told him.

            He smiled, “why yellow?”

            He should know the answer to that. “It’s happy. And I feel bad for yellow. No one ever says yellow is their favorite.” He didn’t laugh at me like my cousins did when I told them I felt bad for yellow. “You can’t feel bad for a color. It doesn’t have feelings,” they would say.

“And sun and dandelions are yellow,” I continued. “And ducks.” It’s only right if your favorite color is the color of some of your favorite things. Except my Dog. She wasn’t yellow. She was black, but black couldn’t be my favorite color. I didn’t like the dark.

I looked down at my feet and squished the grass between my toes. There were no dandelions around. Only a few white wispy ones that were good for wishing on. “Stop killing the dandelions,” I said, looking up.

I had asked my dad so many times not to kill the dandelions. They were too pretty to put killing spray on.

“But they’re weeds, Kaitlyn,” he said, throwing his arms up in the air. He pretended to be annoyed with my request, but I could tell he thought my never-ending attempts to save the dandelions were funny. I laughed. Nothing as pretty as a dandelion could be bad.

“Ok,” he relented. “What’s your least favorite color then?” he asked.

He had never asked that before. He always asked my favorite color – he must have just forgotten every time I told him. Or maybe he just liked to argue about the dandelions. But he never asked for my least favorite color.

            “I don’t know,” I told him. I didn’t like the question. It was mean to pick a least favorite. None of the colors were bad. Some were just happier looking than others.

            “You have to have a least favorite,” he told me. “You have all the reasons why yellow is your favorite, so you must have reasons lined up for a least favorite.”

            I sighed, but I knew he would keep asking if I didn’t give him an answer. I felt bad saying any color was bad.

            “I guess red is my least favorite,” I said and looked up at him, trying to see his face that was cast in shadow by the sun. “It doesn’t mean red is a bad color though. But if I have to pick one, red is my least favorite.”

            He looked surprised. I think he expected me to say brown or white or black – one that wasn’t as bright as red, I guess.

            “Why red?” he asked.

            I knew he would want me to tell him why. I’d already thought about my answer. “Cause red reminds me of blood. Like when I fell down the steps. My lip was bleeding and there was blood everywhere until we went to the hospital. So if I have to pick a least favorite color I’ll pick red.”

***

            The road was mercifully clear with no cars around. The last time I drove down this road was 10 years ago. I never expected to be gone so long. When I got my first job so far away from everything I knew, I was apprehensive. I didn’t want to go. The idea of starting over in a completely knew place was unappealing to me, but my dad told me that he and that old house would be there waiting for me when I wanted to come back. It had been so long since I had driven down this road toward home.

            I couldn’t say what made me start driving when I got in the car after locking my apartment door five hours ago. I kept searching for an explanation, but I didn’t have one. I just suddenly felt like it had been too long. I missed it.

            I always loved the heat of summer, but as I drove, I couldn’t stop looking at the colors on the trees – The countless branches and leaves that wouldn’t hold the color for long. I shivered and turned the heat up in the car. I would never be accustomed to the cold, no matter how many crisp fall seasons or snowy winters I lived to see.

            I hadn’t been on a road trip this long since college. I was revisiting a lot of forgotten pastimes today. I read once somewhere that the sky was most beautiful when you were headed home. It might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn the sky in front of me held more pinks and blues than the sky I had left behind.

            The farther I went, the lighter I felt. I don’t know why it had been so long since I last made the decision to head home. But today seemed like the perfect day for it.

The radio came through the speakers of the car softly. Looking at my unbroken speaker, I was reminded of the speaker in my first car that never worked right. When I got a boombox to sit in the passenger seat of my car, my dad laughed when he saw it and mocked my inability to ride in a car without the radio on.

            I think he actually secretly liked my constant need for music in the car. I was happiest when I was singing along to a song. Maybe it started as a way to fill silence, but I loved it nonetheless.  The songs were a mode of communication for us. It was a language we could both speak when other languages failed us.

            I hadn’t told my dad I was coming home. I didn’t want to face his worry – asking me why I had decided to come home after so long. My dad was good with silence. Talking was always the hard part. Maybe I had just gotten tired of the silence with him – Not knowing what to say to each other. I had spent too long avoiding calls and making excuses for the reasons I couldn’t visit home. I had built a wall with my absence and now I was trying to figure out how to take it down.

            20 years changed a lot. I can’t point my finger at one moment that did it, but at some point, I just stopped knowing how to talk to him. I didn’t know how to show him I cared, and I think he began to feel that his effort was unwanted. It’s far easier to stop trying – to chalk things up to the other person not trying or caring enough. I guess that’s what I did. I stopped trying with him. Once you stop trying to show you care it’s hard to start again.

I felt my heart stop as soon as my car turned the corner. There was an object in the road. I hit the brake as fast as I could.

            There was a bright, red, mangled car flipped on its roof. There was debris across the road. I sat still for a moment and then put the car in park and reached for the door. I did all of this with shaking hands and a numb body. I’m impressed I was able to get out of the car. It seemed much more like me to just shut down – sit in my car until someone else came and fixed the situation.

            The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the car was the silence. I guess you would expect that, in the middle of a tragic moment, the surroundings would match the tragedy. But the air was silent and the trees were just as beautiful as they had been when I was behind the wheel of my car with the road laid out in front of me.

            I didn’t want to approach the car. I knew that in the end I would though. There was no alternative. I don’t know why I was so calm, and I don’t know how long it took me, but I finally approached the car with unsteady steps and lowered myself to my knees beside the door on the driver’s side. I flinched when I saw the hand of the man inside. Logically, a car doesn’t drive itself down the road, but a person in the midst of these crumpled pieces of metal was still a shocking sight.

            I moved my eyes across his body, which was strapped in to his seat, and saw that his chest was moving up and down with his breaths. When my eyes reached his face, I realized that there was blood smeared across his cheek. His eyes were shut, but his features told me that he was in his thirties.

            With one hand on the ground to steady me, I did the most logical thing I had done since I came upon the accident and took out my phone to dial 911. When the operator answered, it was the usual interaction that I had seen on TV so many times. She fired questions at me and I answered her numbly. My name was Kaitlyn. There were no other cars around. The man was still breathing. He was the only one in the car. I couldn’t see any injuries other than the blood on his head.

The operator asked me to stay on the phone with her. Then she told me to move away from the car because it could be dangerous to stay near the wreckage and there was nothing I could do to help him.

            But as I crouched in the middle of an empty street, with a car in shambles next to me, an unconscious man in the driver’s seat, and the voice of a 911 operator coming through my phone, I slowly lowered myself entirely and laid down on the ground with my head on my arm. I could see the man better this way. He still hadn’t stirred, but if he did, I didn’t want him to regain consciousness in an overturned car with no one beside him. As I laid face to face with him, I found I couldn’t take my eyes off the streak of crimson on his cheek.

            Staring at the bright color that harshly contrasted with the man’s pale skin, I found myself remembering a day from too many years ago. I hadn’t knowingly associated red with blood in a long time, but I had a feeling that after today I would make the same connection my childhood self had made all those years ago.

            “My least favorite color is red,” I said, before I realized that I had even opened my mouth. “I bet yours would be now too if you were me.” The man didn’t move and I didn’t expect him to regain consciousness just to hear my useless commentary. “I guess you must like the color red since your car is red. That’s already a strike against you. Our friendship is looking bleak.”

 I stopped for a moment but then continued the one-sided conversation. “My dad used to ask me about my favorite and least favorite color a lot. I think he thought it was funny that a little girl could get so defensive of something as simple as a color. No one’s asked me my favorite color in a long time. It’s yellow, by the way. In case you really wanted to know that about me.”

            It seemed that, when I couldn’t rely on music to fill the silence, I substituted with nonsensical ramblings. While lying on the ground, I got the strange feeling that I was at a sleepover, lying next to a friend, sharing secrets in the silence. It felt odd that I could share what would likely be a life altering moment with this man and never know his name.

            When the paramedics arrived, they showed concern for me. I guess when you’re lying on a road in the middle of broken glass it usually means there’s something wrong with you. I moved out of the way to let them reach the man. I was examined by a paramedic and taken to a police car to give my statement.

            They took him away in an ambulance. I never saw him open his eyes, and since he wasn’t exactly in a position to be talkative when I met him, I never learned his name. I know that he couldn’t hear me, and he couldn’t get away from the conversation even if he wanted to. But I had the odd urge to thank him for listening.

            I was surprised when the police officer told me that I was free to go. It didn’t seem right that I was allowed to just drive away from this experience.

            Sometimes now when I can’t sleep at night, I picture that man and his life. I hope it’s mundane and full of stories about favorite colors. If I tried, I could probably have found out what happened to the man, but a large part of me didn’t want to know, so when the officer told me I was free to leave, I got in my car and drove away.

            As I drove the rest of the way home, I realized that the road I had stopped my car on was only 20 minutes from my house. I was so close to making it home when I found a man hanging upside down in his overturned car.

            When I finally reached my house, I looked up at the brick structure with its wide front yard. It hadn’t changed since I had last seen it. Maybe that’s why it was easy to stay away for so long – I knew the house and my dad with it would still be waiting for me to return.

            I knocked on the front door of my house and realized that this was possibly the first time in my life I had to knock on this door instead of just using my key. As I waited for my dad to answer the door, I attempted to smooth down my hair. I must have looked like I had been thrown to the wolves. But he’d seen me worse, so I gave up and just waited.

            When he opened the door, I registered the shock on his face and then the worry, followed by tears in his eyes. We weren’t ones for conversation though, so I just hugged him. His confusion at my sudden appearance was still present as he stepped aside so I could walk into the foyer. I didn’t have the energy to address any of his concerns then, and I knew he would let me wait until I was ready to talk.

            I took off my coat, slipped off my shoes, and stopped in the foyer. “I never asked you,” I said. “What’s your favorite color?”