It was a splash of some colors in a panorama of tan and beige, framed by bricks. It was the space between two words that mattered, a space that separated item from thing into something understandable. It was unnoticed, just a void in your peripheral, but contained everything you needed and wanted to remember.

The space thrived between the corner of the wall and the ends of the garage door. It sat behind the driveway, shadowed the window, grew above the pavement and flattened below the sky. In what I remember, it was full of shades that bloomed from veiny petals and stability that stemmed from stringy stalks.

In it grew the purple flower that looked like grapes. At first I thought the purple was closer to a darker ocean blue, but after learning the word indigo with syllables rolling off my tongue in an air conditioned classroom, I knew what to call the round flowers that grew in bunches on green stalks. 

I picked a flower from the garden once and ate it, bunches of seeds encased in delicate indigo leaflets bursting on my tongue – along with the seeds came a bitter taste that made my face scrunch, and my mind recoil in the shock that the indigo flower did not taste like grapes.

Perhaps, if they were more purple like grapes, they would taste like them too – that is what I thought when I spit them out into the trash can under the sink.

In any memory I have it’s just indigo. Indigo petals, indigo bulbs, indigo seeds. It would greet me when I stepped off the bus, coming home from school, and it would brim the edges of my vision when I did my homework outside on the driveway. When I would plant new flowers with my mother, indigo invaded my vision and left my hands stained with the slick color, and washing it off turned the water pale indigo. 

We had to dig up the indigo plants when we moved away, of course. And so with a sharp pale gray shovel, I scooped piles of dirt with plants sticking out like needles.

Indigo thrown into dark bags thrown into metal dumpsters. 

Indigo falling on the pavement when the petals drifted off the stem. 

Indigo in my hands when I cupped the seeds for the second time and shoved them into my mouth.

The bitter taste, although still a stranger to my tastebuds, was familiar. Sharp, tangy, bursting and coating my lips. My face scrunched as I swallowed.

I wondered idly if my insides were now coated with indigo. I wonder occasionally if they still are coated with indigo.

It was a clear stream of indigo in a now faded landscape of washed out grays and yellow whites, a garden plot framed by bricks. It was space in a world that mattered, a space that separated concrete suburbs from meadows of flowers into something nostalgic. It was unnoticed, a splash of nothing in my peripheral, but contained everything I should’ve remembered. 

Because the only thing I remember from that palette, that space, is bitter indigo.