Indigo Prose

She looks up from her pen and paper, and when her gaze meets mine she asks, “is this prose too purple?” Words trip over her tongue, but I couldn’t rightly tell you their color.
 
I lift my palms. “I’m color blind, so prose is never purple to me.”
 
She tosses her pen at me, but I hadn’t meant to joke. I know it’s a figure of speech, but I prefer to imagine it’s something I can never quite behold in full, that will always shapeshift into something more familiar: a blue moon, perhaps.
 
She leans back in her chair, and stretches into sun as warm as toffee spilled across the room.
 
“Can’t you tell my hair is red?”
 
“In the right light,” I say, and it’s true. She is sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette, but in moments like these, she glows a different color entirely, lit up like the sun.
 
And if that’s not red, then the rest of the world has it wrong, and not me.