What Color is Your Passport?

Passports. They’re important.

Anything with a stamp or a notarization given by someone in uniform is most likely important. Often, we keep these documents locked and hidden because they make us nervous. Yes, a piece of paper or a little booklet or a number holds the power to send a mind into a fit of anxiety. How absurd is that?

A few weeks back, I ran into a previous home to retrieve one of these documents. This home was a different home. Someone painted the walls different colors—lovely colors, but different colors.

Colors. They’re important too.

Last semester, I wrote about how colors can shape our identities. They can also change our feelings about home.

My childhood best friend lived in a house down the street from me. I spent a good portion of ages 5-12 walking down the street between these two houses, excited to see my friend and excited to see her house. Her father is a graphic artist and, as a result, the house’s colors changed constantly. My friend and I would get off at the bus stop together and walk into a different home on a regular basis.

Until I walked into my own home on that same street—now, a slightly different home—I hadn’t realized what a shock colors could be. Colors—they’re something entirely ordinary, but extraordinary when they are so deeply entrenched in our perceptions and identities.

My childhood friend eventually moved to a home in a different city, but later I got accepted to a college in that city. Sometimes, she gets off at a bus stop that’s not far from my house. We don’t live in homes on the same street, but it’s something close. 

And now, I have my passport in some location somewhere. One could say it has its own home. My passport is blue, a friend’s is red, and another friend has more than one passport. They’re all important, but not as important as the meaning that we give them.

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Photo by Christina Kohler

I scribbled something about colors in a field notebook in Knysna, South Africa last summer. The assignment was to sit, to watch the sunset, and to write until it became too dark to see the page. If you’re interested, this is it in electronic form:

            As she looked upon the mountains in the distance and the sun setting over the clouds and the fruitful valley beneath her, she thought about all of the colors. They seemed to form a subtle gradient, each peak a darker green, then blue, each cloud fading from gold to peach to white.

 It reminded her of the day her parents came home with a bundle of paint swatches and she was asked to pick just one color for the four walls of her room. She always loved all colors, and she begged her father to let her choose many. When her request was denied, she settled on a color called Sunset Rose. Her friend told her, “It’s impossible to be sad in a pink room.”

Today, she noticed a bit of Sunset Rose peeking between the descending clouds and the mountains below them. She compared it to all of the other colors around her—the dark green of the pines, the smoky blue of the mountains in the distance, the coral red of the aloe flower beside her, the golden light of the falling sun. She didn’t know what color she would choose today, for all of them were magnificent.

When the laughter of the Hadeedah birds echoed over the valley, she thought about what color it would be, if colors could represent sounds. Because these birds woke her before dawn that morning, she decided it would be an ugly color.

As she watched plumes of white smoke cover the valley, she thought about how people were always trying to take away the colors. They were taking away the emerald of the yellowwoods and they were diverting the sapphire of the grand lakes back home. She wondered if the world was asking her to choose just one color. 

She really did not want to choose.