Synethesia: orange and black.
I've had a longtime aversion to the color orange. Pink, too: the more warmer and more salmon-y, the less pleasant, but only orange would make me scrunch up my nose and turn away. It is largely because, in my personal synesthetic spectrum, orange is the color of pain.
I actually don't have a whole lot of color associations; nearly everything is kinetic, sound, and taste, in roughly that order. But pain has always been in the orange spectrum: pink-orange for sharp pain, becoming shocking, lightning-flash pink with ramping intensity: malevolent umbers and bittersweets for lingering abdominal pain; dark orange hazily striped with black for a chronic ache. As i've gotten older, i've become less adverse to it, trained myself not to recoil, and to appreciate its place in art and structure, but it will probably never be a favorite.
Which makes the dream strange. For some time now, i've had dreams of body painting: of a particular pattern for each friend, subtly altering, but internally consistent, and of laying it stroke by stroke on their skin. I haven't been writing these down, but instead putting them in my sketchbook, as best i'm able.
There is one that has been incomplete for months. The base pattern is the same: burning, twisting leaves, starting very low on the right hip, twisting up the whole length of his torso to a twining, tentacled char-black, the left shoulder and throat bare, not yet consumed. The colors, however, the shapes, have always been wrong: three pages of frustration in the middle of calm experiments. Some other designs are also incomplete, but none so much as this one.
A little nap on my desk, just now, and the dream: layers of pale orange and bronze forming lily petals, graceful curves like the arms of muses, like swords. Brushing them with darkest umber and beige, lighting them with red; incinerating them with black.
My friend, my beloved's color. The one that belongs on his skin. And so, for the first time, i found it beautiful.