5pm_weds | eighty-six. [THEME: all the colours of the rainbow]

Big White Elephant
Artist: In-Flight Safety
Album: We Are an Empire, My Dear
Year: 2009
♥: There was a time, in 2009, when I felt worse than I do now. I can find fall difficult, despite loving the season desperately: everything seems to come to a head, and sometimes that's powerful and incredible, and other times it's devastating. Flip back three years and I was having panic attacks, feeling my heart start racing as the time crawled towards the double PM digits because it meant it was time for bed, and that I'd have to face the morning. I didn't want to wake up.

Life is not the best it's been, this past week. If I didn't know better, I'd feel like the universe was conspiring against me -- every time I feel a bit better, something happens to drag me through the mud again. When my face is down there, it seems like I will never find air again, never have a moment to wash the filth off.
But it was worse in 2009.
And now, I look back on that time, that year, as important. Meaningful. I found beauty, love, joy, even when I felt a crushing weight of sadness. The songs I listened to still resonate deeply,
of which this is one.

Sometimes 'white' gets the short end of the colour stick (see "black and white aren't colours!" arguments made by elementary school children), but that's really not quite fair considering it's the amalgamation of all the colours, a twisted tryst of invisible shades. But when you're asked what white symbolizes, it's rarely something emotional -- often it's the absence of emotion. Purity, spirituality, cleanliness: where is the passion of red, the positivity of yellow, the sorrow of blue, the natural warmth of green?

If I am feeling 'white,' I have to remember, it might not be because I feel empty. It is often because all of those other colours are twined so tightly around my heart that I can't distinguish between them.

So a song that I thought was colourless, on an old playlist because I thought it was a good song and Meg and I danced around our apartment to it one September night in 2009 --- suddenly has a rainbow of colours attached. With enough time, and distance, that feeling of white has become all the colours of the rainbow.

And I'll get there with the songs from this fall, too ----
I know there's something large
Just hiding in the dark
A big white elephant.