Image courtesy of mypubliclands on Flickr (CC by 2.0)
Deep, magical, dusted with stars: midnight blue. It was my favorite Crayola color. It was rich, mystical, a dark night blue with the tiniest hint of green. I looked for excuses to color night scenes, to color oceans.
The Crayola boxes don’t contain midnight blue anymore. I’ve not found its equal. Anything similar is too light, too dark, too grey, too green, not green enough. The midnight blue I remember was the dark blue of deep water at dusk, when there’s enough light to give it color, but not so dark it would be black.
I always wondered why “midnight blue.” Every sky I’ve seen at midnight is black. But the Crayola color was reminiscent of the beautiful blue of dusk, when the sun has set and there may be a hint of pink at the horizon, but it’s quickly being consumed by a blue green that darkens with every second as night takes over day.
The color — that dark dusk blue — is possibly my favorite color in nature, as it deepens into night into the midnight blue Crayola color. It awes me. It feels almost sacred.
Thinking of it like that reminds me of that novel, Sacré Bleu by Christopher Moore, about Van Gogh and the lengths he went to to get the blue pigments for his paintings. What a book. I think Moore (or more accurately, Van Gogh) felt the same way about midnight blue — and all the blues — that I do. It’s magical. It draws you in. You can disappear into it’s depths: the depth of the sky. The depth of the ocean.
There’s maybe a bit of madness in it.
This is a ten-minute free write prompted by the words “Midnight blue.” I pulled the prompt from my prompt box, set the timer for 10 minutes, and wrote until the timer stopped.
Butterfly Mind 