It seemed like it was a cloud built just for the summer. One of those clouds you see when the air is humid and warm and the rain has just come or just gone. The peepers were out, and the moisture between my fingers reminded me of when I still chased fireflies in the front yard of my parent's house at dusk, the white one with the wraparound half-screened-in porch. I could pinpoint that cloud's time of day, season, and location on a world map with only the color palette of this towering cumulonimbus and its surroundings.
First, the dark, viridescent, endlessly varying but exceptionally green shades of green. To Google search sap green, or forest green, bring the brightness down a touch, and place all the endless variations on the same idea together, on a lawn or in a tree. Just to the right is deep charcoal black, or lamp black, not yet full black, soft in its warmth still left from the sun, moist from rain, drying but not yet dry. Looking up, a blue that extends from the last dregs of daylight to the onset of night but refuses to reveal where each individual color starts or ends. More than the night itself, this blue invites a view into the heavens, into some endless stretch of space where the young can dream of spaceships, or of love, a future's hopeful promise. The blue is stopped by a soft, shining pink, no, red, no, orange. An entire half of a color wheel held for fifteen minutes in a shifting mass of globby, luminescent indulgence. The falloff from the brightest orange back to the hazy purples is visible yet indeterminable. The highlight color sinks in, refusing to be forgotten, like a bright ground, some cad yellow mixed with alizarin crimson that still glows under translucent glazes. The color reverberates, reflecting into the shadowy purples and creating more pockets of color like a bolt of lighting frozen in time. The purple fades off below into hazy nothingness, punctuated every so often by a few more hints of orange.
As I write this, I listen to the warm rain and thunder that has since arrived. Summer is on the horizon, and with it, drastic life changes. Life has made me anxious to leave, anxious to move on, taking with me only what is important and leaving behind all else. My friends and family will always be with me, dead or alive, bridges burned or maintained, whether or not I show it. At this time in my life, I must keep moving, I must go out, I must create. Keep moving. Go out. Create.
Move. Make. Move. Make. Move. Make.