collar

We met on an app with a blue icon. It seems too saccharine to say, too obvious to point out, but there it is. I saw him first as a blue-eyed boy in my Twitter DMs.

“Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance?” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Five minutes before our planned first date (that neither of us was sure was a date) in a midtown coffee shop, he DMed me, “Just got here and snagged us a table! Wearing a blue button-down shirt.” I knew immediately that I was doomed.

A blue-eyed boy in a blue button-down is a crush catastrophe waiting to happen. A periwinkle-edged bomb threatening to spark into smithereens. I wasn’t nervous, until the moment I read that message at the 5th Avenue intersection and preemptive desire bloomed in my belly.

My smile was too big when I walked through the door. His shirt was as promised; his eyes were so blue. He kept staring at me hard as I spun stories for him, like he was trying to X-ray through my irises straight to my corneas. “I feel like you’re really listening to me,” I said, breathless, the third time his gaze passed through me so razor-sharp that I lost my train of thought mid-sentence.

“I am,” he said, brow furrowed, like: of fucking course I am. I wanted to kiss him already. I knew all that blue would doom me.

“So what would it be a symptom of, to start seeing colors – or, more oddly, just one color – more acutely? Mania? Monomania? Hypomania? Shock? Love? Grief?”

Two days after I got back from the New York trip when I met him, he texted me: “Oh, by the way, keep an eye on the mail tomorrow.”

Hunched over my laptop in a café window and already caffeine-hyped as hell, I breathed slow to try to still my heart. But I couldn’t keep myself from tapping out: “…??? The physical mail?”

He wrote, “Yeah.” I wrote, “……?????” He was, as usual, calm. I was, as usual, very not.

The next day, I waited by the door with a cup of tea, thrilling, swooning, wondering. When the package arrived, I clawed it from the box with an agitated grin, then tore it open unthinkingly. A copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets fell into my lap, and I made a sound like a mama lion protecting her cub.

Bluets had been on my Amazon wishlist since the month previous, when Rachel Syme – whose writing I adore – had recommended it. She called it “the very best book about a color and a breakup and obsession and melancholy and rare facts about pigmentation,” so, obviously, I wanted to read it. And now, as I opened it up, a gift note fell out with this impossibly handsome boy’s name inked under the Amazon letterhead. “Kate, I love this book, and when I saw it on your wishlist, I didn’t want anyone else to get it for you first,” he’d written. “I hope you love it too.” I bit my lip hard and wondered – anxiously, irrationally – if this meant he maybe, kinda, sorta, possibly liked me.

“Did you open it?” he asked me via text, and I spilled thank-yous and exclamations onto him. But he merely replied, “Did you ask first?” No. No, I had not.

“You know better. I’ll probably have to punish you,” he wrote. I could almost see the devious, teasing smile emanating from his punctuation. “You should bring it to New York after you’ve read it, and I’ll hit you with it. That’ll be your punishment for getting a little too excited and opening it without asking first.”

I choked on my tea. “Okay, Sir,” I said. “I can do that.” And I did.

“Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.”

I read Bluets slowly, savoring it, because every sentence was so packed with meaning and pain that I had to pause several times a page just to breathe and think. It is a book about Maggie Nelson’s obsession with the color blue, during her recovery from a break-up, and it resonated deeply with me. I’d had inexplicable obsessions of my own, in the months since the recent break-up that had speared through my heart.

One day, Sir – I was calling him Sir by then – sent me to a local coffee shop he’d chosen for me because I needed caffeine and food and felt overwhelmed by the world. I sat on a church pew in the sunny café, sipping a latte, munching the specific croissant he’d told me to get, and paging through Bluets with biblical reverence.

“This book is like if Didion was a philosopher,” I texted him, and he replied, “God, you’re brilliant. Fuck. I need you.” I blushed a little and slid further down into my seat, made smaller by his words, made heavier and more meaningful by Maggie Nelson’s.

Twenty minutes and several pages later, I texted him, “lol I’m getting too emotional, I think I should go back to bed,” and he responded, “Welp, saw that coming.” He knew my heart so well already. I trudged through the snow, tears spilling down my cheeks for no reason except that I was so happy about my new relationship and the safety and fulfilment I felt therein, there was nowhere else for my feelings to leak but up and out. I cried in my building’s lobby. I cried in the elevator. I cried in the hallway. I cried as I unlocked the door and weaved toward my bedroom and collapsed onto my big, blue bed.

“Thank you for not thinking my feelings are excessive,” I texted Sir, tears splashing on my touchscreen.

“I am not at all worried about your feelings being excessive,” he replied immediately. “Not even 1%. Not at all.” I cried some more. My periwinkle pillowcases turned navy, in broad, damp patches.

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping – its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.”

One day I asked him if he’d like to pick the hex code that would represent him in my sex spreadsheet, and he was exactly as excited about it as I’d hoped he would be.

Nine minutes elapsed. I could hear him thinking and Googling and eye-dropper’ing from 500 miles away. I read a few pages of Bluets in the interim. My phone beeped. “Can you see how #5FC2EA would look for me, baby? It’s from the cover of Bluets, so I think it fits.”

Weeks later, we laid in a hotel bed side-by-side after sex and I pulled up my spreadsheet on my computer. Just a couple of naked nerds. I opened the custom colors menu in Google Sheets. I sleuthed out the hex code in my messages app. I typed it carefully into my browser. I applied it to the cells bearing Sir’s name. As those rows flooded with brilliant blue, we both moaned.

“It’s perfect,” he said, awed.

“Yeah. It is.”

“One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.”

We were only on our second date when we discussed him collaring me, but by that point we’d talked on the phone for dozens of hours, so it only felt a little ridiculous.

“It has to be blue, right? There are some blue chainmaille collars on Etsy that I like, with heart-shaped padlocks, and there’s Tarina Tarantino heart necklaces,” I rambled over tortelloni at a stunning, stately restaurant he’d taken me to. “Or, the company that makes my turquoise collar also makes a royal blue one.”

“I know,” he said, immediately, piercing my hazel eyes with his blue ones like pinning a bug to a corkboard. “I know that.” Gooseflesh overtook my whole body as I indulged in imagining why he knew that: him trawling the L’Amour-Propre website late at night, face bathed in laptop light, breath catching as his eyes fixed on that electric blue.

Weeks later, we revisited the conversation. It became clear there was no other collar for us. “It’s just… perfect,” I murmured, peering at it in my browser in Toronto while he eyed it from his in New York. “Yeah,” he replied. I heard the pivotal click of “Add to Cart.”

“And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.”

One afternoon in February, we checked into a Brooklyn hotel. Cool blue sunlight streamed in the big windows and lit up the white queen-sized bed that would house our passion for two days to come. I still felt breathless around him, plagued with stage-fright, terrified I’d fuck something up.

“I brought you something,” he said, pulling a ridiculous oversized chocolate bar from his suitcase for me, and I laughed. “And something else,” he added, and this time he produced a black leather case, which, when he opened it, contained that stunning piece of cobalt suede. Time stood still in my body, like I’d hit “pause” on my heart and lungs. Oh. Wow.

“Do you like it?” I think he said. I don’t exactly remember, because I liked it so much.

He had me kneel in front of him on the floor, and I stared out the window at the birds and cerulean sky and bare tree branches as he pushed my hair to one side and pulled the suede close against my throat. I’d known this moment would stir my emotions but I didn’t know quite how much. Now, feeling his warmth against my back and his clever fingers doing up the buckle at the nape of my neck, I blinked to spill the tears I felt welling in my eyes. I sobbed a little, a soft sound in the sunlit silence.

We went to look in the bathroom mirror together, and I cried more there, struck suddenly by the blue against my throat and the kind-hearted man standing beside me in my reflection. He held me tight and we looked at each other, at ourselves, slightly disbelieving but wanting to believe. I felt overtaken by blue, and also I didn’t feel blue at all.

“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”