It’s no secret that I love yellow. It is my color of joy. It was my first lesson in brightening up my basement room. And not for the reason you may think. Yes it added more light. But it was more when I had to give up that room. That room that I chose for the first time. Picked the color of carpeting and bedspread. It held my dreams and secrets and heart promises made just before sleep, confirmed at dawn. All in yellow. It wasn’t the bedspread that I worried about losing. What if everything I had dreamed of in that space would also be taken away? I didn’t know. 

When my mom and I moved from apartment to apartment, the layouts and colors changed, but to my joyful surprise my heart’s yellow remained. What a comfort it was, is, to know it. 

People can take from you a lot of things. But not your heart. Oh, they can bruise it, almost break it at times, dull it, but you get to decide what remains. What is the color of your joy. Your soul. 

It has only been a week since my hand surgery. Only, I laugh. I want to paint. Standing in front of my joy in the studio, I know that I will. Soon. My fingers twitch in yellow heart promises, and dream of strokes to come.