Assignment: Write about the color green.

You know when you stare at a word for too long and it stops looking real? When the individual characters cease to make sense and all that you’re left with is a feeling? Green has done that to me. Attempting to describe and talk about a color is such a nonsensical thing to do because it’s both very abstract and very tangible at the same time. Green is a broken bottle on a beach; the color of mine, my cat’s, and Harry and Lilly Potter’s eyes; the light Jay Gatsby stared at night after night, all of which are visibly green. Green is also envy; it’s wealth; it’s both life and death, it symbolizes so much with just the mixing of yellow and blue to make one color, with vast amounts of hues that represent many different things to many different people. Math is green to me; my last name, Lancaster, is green to me; my favorite t-shirts are all green, and yet it’s not my favorite color; green smells like nasal spray and springtime; green feels like walking on newly grown grass in my backyard with the cold mud squishing between my toes on my way to the questionable green water of Lake Allatoona; green is the evergreen in my yard pricking my back as I pose for my mom to document every major milestone; green is my childhood bedroom. Green is security and home for me, it’s familiar. Green is hope for Gatsby. Green is the uncivilized chaos of nature for Sir Gawain. Green is potentially spoiled food for Sam, I am. One part yellow, one part blue mixed with a palette knife. The absorption of red and blue wavelengths. Five letters that don’t really make sense to me anymore.

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