I was never a regular college goer but I sort of knew who was who, owing most of that knowledge to my circle of punctual friends who would feed me gossips almost everyday plus a bit of social media stalking would do the touch up. I can't exactly locate the origin of my unpunctuality but as much as I remember, it had something to do with the feeling of being out of place. I had so many friends but for some reason, I never felt like I belonged to anyone. There is a word for that feeling but nothing could capture the intensity of how I felt everyday. But good lord, did I gave an amazing group of friends. Anyway, what brings my pen to this paper is a girl. Political science department of our college was huge and to begin to learn their faces and names would be a humongous task. In that crowd was this tall girl with brown hair touching her shoulders. There was something different about her clothes that indelibly imprinted on me. Loose shirt, Levi's jeans and sneakers would be her regular. Her wardrobe was, perhaps, too boring. Blue, pink, yellow, orange. Blue. Blue would always catch my eyes. Her brown hair perfectly suited her blue T-Shirt or maybe the color Blue had something to do with me. Maybe it was also the color of my soul. Blue was a mirage like the color of the sky that deceives us into believing that Sky Blue is really something. Blue was the crayon I used for the water, despite having known it's transparent. So, does that blue that I have been taking so pride in calling the color of my soul, really exist? Which brings me to the thought that an object perhaps does not even have to exist for us to romanticise it. But it did exist right, at least on her T-shirt it did. And it looked beautiful. She was beautiful. Her blue T-Shirt and her brown hair would always elicit my creepy staring behaviour. Thankfully, my friends would always point that out and I'd get along with my day. Out of the three days in the entire week that I'd come to college, I'd see her at least once and she would always trigger some weird thought process in me. Blue had never touched me like that before.
Months passed and I started coming to college less. Her thought word cross my head once in a while and every time it would, her blue would grow a little more on me. In the wake of December when the chilly mornings would give me a little more reason to skip college, I'd think that it's been quite some time since I met my friends, my loyal group of friends. It was a Thursday afternoon when I saw her again. A bit paler than before, wearing a Pink t-shirt and her usual Levi's and Vans. Pink never caught me and so, her head did. Bald. Bare. Not a single strand. More than surprised, I starting getting anxious. I didn't care about where I was supposed to head for my next class or what was the syllabus for my upcoming internal,all I ever wanted to know was where her brown hair had gone. I went around and inquired a little. Apparently she went through a chemotherapy and that's how she lost her hair. But that's not important, I wasn't matured enough in my 20s to empathise with her but I knew she was suffering.
What's important, however, is that I had never craved brown so much. For once, I wanted to see her hair again. I was so engrossed in her blue that I missed that Brown was beautiful too, more so. I wished I could have come to college for a little more time and stared at her for a couple more minutes because at that point of time, I wanted Brown more than the Blue.
But no wonder, she looked just the same regardless. Beautiful.