#mud brown

They were both middle-class kids, and this matters much to the story. At least he thought of it that way. She didn’t think of it that way because she didn’t think of it much at that time. He then remembered that, usually, when he began to think this way—what she wears, blue or green or anything—it means that he was thinking about her when she wasn’t in front of him, which in turn means that the next time she’d be in front of him, he would feel strange, because all those thoughts that he’d thought of her would crowd his mind so much that you can’t he wouldn’t be able to see the colors in her backpack or purse. Like a traffic jam of fragments and words and colors, stuck in thought's paved highways. 

She was in the classroom. The professor talked about flux and permanence. Et cetera, she thought. Et cetera and more. She wanted to talk to her friend about what had happened in the place the night before. She looked at the blue sky through the window and remembered that when it rains the soil turns mud and that feet stand on the mud, not in the mud.

Thinking of the mud-brown or of any color at all meant that she was thinking indirectly about him. And now even when she thought of the word “color” and not of any particular color, she was, in some way, thinking about him. Color was starting to crowd her mind, and she could not believe this. She raised her hand.

“Professor, I wonder what Plato or Heraclitus or any of these philosophers would say about human passions in relation to the facts of impermanence and flux and the things of the world. How, say, for example, the feeling of love towards someone or something, the natural attraction of all things human and feeling, how that goes into the universe equation. Or something else, like the color of—” she stopped short, trying to think of another color, but, alas, there was none other to think of. So, she finished the sentence thus: “the color of mud… brown.”