You can be the prettiest shade of red, but it doesn’t matter if someone’s favorite color is blue.
The saddest part is that red is almost the exact opposite of blue. Red is warm, while blue is cool. Red comes closer; blue recedes. Red demands to be seen, while blue asks for space. Red is urgency, appetite, blood, and heat. Blue is distance, silence, sky, and somewhere too deep to reach.
For a while, red might believe that it simply isn’t vibrant enough. Maybe it needs to be brighter, softer, darker, more elegant, or less overwhelming. Maybe if it becomes the most beautiful shade of red anyone has ever seen, it will finally be chosen. So red keeps refining itself. It looks back at every moment when someone turned away and thinks about all the different shades it has been.
It apologizes for being too bright, too intense, too much, or too noticeable. It tries to tone itself down and become easier to look at without admitting what it is actually doing: slowly treating its own nature as a flaw.
But the problem was never that red wasn’t beautiful enough. It was trying to win a prize that could never be awarded to it because, no matter how beautiful it becomes, it will never be blue.
Perhaps that hurts more than simply being called ugly. Ugliness is a judgment that can be rejected because beauty is subjective. Someone else might look at the same color and find it breathtaking, but it is harder to know what to do when someone sees red’s beauty clearly and still does not prefer it. There is nothing left to prove. Red cannot become more beautiful in a way that would solve the problem because its beauty was never the problem in the first place.
There is no villain in color preference. Blue is not cruel for being blue, and red is not superior because it burns more brightly. Sometimes two colors belong in the same painting, and their contrast makes the whole thing more beautiful. But sometimes they belong to entirely different worlds, and red cannot become blue without disappearing first.
Red can still grow. It can learn when its heat becomes destructive, become softer without becoming smaller, and learn to exist beside silence without immediately trying to fill it. But growing and changing color are two different things. There is a difference between becoming a healthier red and spending its life apologizing for not being blue.
Maybe blue was never truly the favorite color. Maybe it only felt peaceful because red had become associated with arguments, history, responsibility, and everything that felt too overwhelming to face. Maybe some distance from the fire was necessary to understand whether its warmth was truly unwanted or whether someone had simply been standing too close to it for too long.
Distance may eventually offer an answer, but red cannot build its life around that possibility. It cannot remain on display indefinitely, waiting for someone to reconsider their favorite color.
At some point, red has to stop asking how it can make someone choose red and begin asking why it has been trying so hard to convince someone that its color is worth loving.
You can be the prettiest shade of red and still not be chosen by someone who wants blue. Red may eventually understand that this was never a question of beauty. It can understand that completely and still wish, sometimes, that it had been blue.
