Everpink

I've been trying to find a new colour. If I can just work out this puzzlebox - that's what it's for - and I can almost see it.  As the pieces click, clack past each other, three by three... again and again and again, I'm sure it's almost there, and then these pieces slide over those pieces in such a way that they elide the unknown; skirt the exotic; brush the border of the new. So I'm left again with hues you, and I, and everyone, have seen before.

Baby blue. Mint green. Lemon yellow.

I think my new colour might be some kind of disruptive pink like shiny candy. An unstable pink. A shade that decays to pink. It has a half-life which tells you how long it will, be before half of it has collapsed into a state of simply being pink. I can't recreate it in the puzzlebox, but I can feel it within myself. While I've been working the click-clack toy over and over it's moved from the depths of my id, through my nervous system to my fingers, somewhere between skin and bone and tendon. But it won't do to cut me open. You'll only see red.

No. I need to find the way to get it from here, within my hands, to there, in the puzzlebox. Somewhere between the baby and the mint and the lemon. Or... not between them. Away from them. Somewhere in the gaps, I need to...

I need mint yellow. Baby green. Lemon blue.

I need none of these.

Everpink

Oh if I could only figure how to stop the toy obeying the fundamental laws of physics quite so rigorously.

(Oh if I could only put it down in words. You know that for a long time there was no word for orange? For brown? For blue, even? Let's deep dive in the wine-dark sea. For most of the history of the Universe, there were no words for colours at all.)

But it just goes on being part of the same world as me. Click, click, click. As what you see of me. Clack, clack, clack. You don't see the emerald pink, the forest pink, the Kelly pink, the everpink.

And what don't I see of you?