The colors

There is a swirl of color that accompanies all things. 

Every twist and turn, every fall and failure. All words spoken and sung, every smile or laugh. 

There’s a way it gets louder and softer all at once when I ride, write, or dance. 

Writing is where it gets stuck beneath my skin, where all the colors become sensation and transform into little dancing creatures in my mind. 

If I focus, if I let them- I swear I can see them around me, fighting and twisting and dancing and feeling. 

I am consumed by the power of them, of their creation. The only escape I’ve found is through my fingertips, where I can feel their color flow through my body and onto a page. Where my only reprieve is the speed at which I can find the right words to which I can encompass them. 

Then they settle. 

And then they grow again. 

I imagine this is what addiction is like, though the high of finding time and quiet and space to write is almost unparalleled, and never grows old. Where my worlds and those characters can come to life, where they can find freedom through my fingers and whisper their plans onto my pages. 

As incredible as it is, as much as I love it, I can never escape it. This insatiable itch I can never force to settle or go away. 

Where a name or word I hear, where something I see or feel can trigger them in an instant, and I am consumed by those colors. 

There is never enough time, never enough paper or words to capture and release them properly.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like for those who don’t feel the crippling need to release these colors, for those who don’t have to see the world from a perspective of words. 

Other times I wonder if everyone has this. If others have just learned to quiet or ignore the itch, silence the call to creation. 

I don’t know whether I crave that thought or fear it. 

The colors are different in movement. Where they no longer belong to others, and instead they’re mine. Where I have a chance to be in control, where every sensation is mine and doesn’t need to be released. For movement is release, and I am nothing in that moment if not movement. 

Riding and dancing are one in the same, in these moments. 

Where I can twirl and spin and feel my body lit up in its odd power, where the swish of silk and curl of chiffon can help pull those colors from beneath my skin. 

In riding, with horses, when I am gifted the energy of my horse, my partner, then it soothes my own colors. I am settled, centered, and focused by it. By the chance to learn how to weave another’s body and emotions. 

The flow and energy of it, power and life that consumes me, though it never threatens to break me apart the same way writing does. 

There is a release in it, in the chance of creation and creativity in movement and power. 

Though when it doesn’t work, when my partner won’t lend their colors, and doesn’t want to dance with me, that’s when it hurts, and aches more than writing ever could. 

That’s when the pain of writing- of enduring the burn of colors as they’re released is preferable to what my horse has left me with.

Regardless, there is color, and there is never enough time.