The Color Purple

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."
--Alice Walker

Purple has been my favorite color for as long as I can remember. It's not as bright as red or yellow, and it's richer than blue or green. It's a mixture of two colors that you don't expect. I always thought it made sense for red and yellow to make orange, but not for red and blue to make purple. It's always been my color. In so many ways, I think I loved purple because I thought of it as representing myself. Not pure, not light, nor dark, but beautiful in its own way.

Charleston is not a city for purple. It's a place for red, for blue, for yellow. It's a place for primary colors, where everyone fits into a box, everyone is given a label. Aside from the label that people are given (rich, poor, black, white, etc.), there are the labels people give themselves. You've got the preps, the hippies, the goths, the artists, the outdoorsies. Everyone chooses a box. Then they live into it, conform to it, or perform a radical switch and get out of it. It is not a city for mixes. It is not a city for eclectics. It is not a city for purple.

That creates a problem: I'm purple, and I'm not going to leave Charleston anytime soon. As I see it, I have three options:
1) renounce the color purple
2) create box for purple
3) defy the box system altogether.

It's a hard choice to make. But, I can get to an answer through process of elimination. It's not option 1. After all, purple ought to be appreciated for being purple. It's not option 3. What was purple before it had a name? Everything that is important has a name. That leaves me with option 2. I have to create a box for myself.

Now, the bigger question: how?