There are very few things in life that I do not like to talk about. Carrying out discussions with strangers and friends about everything from politics to religion is easy. Although I have found it easy to discuss those things, I find it hard to talk about my past relationships, no matter how intense or important they were to me. Recently, I have discovered that talking about previous relationships can be really therapeutic. Since I now have a platform to share my innermost thoughts, why not use it as a tool? Since I got my first Iphone, I have been using the notes app as a sort of digital diary. I have entries on there dated back to middle school. There are so many memories and lost thoughts stored on there, and I think I am ready to release those thoughts to the world. Here is one of a series of thoughts that I have stored in the mysterious notes section of my phone:

I met him the way most girls meet their first love. I met him in school. He appeared to be the most basic of human beings in every sense. There was nothing different or spectacular about him. Everything about the boy was brown. From his eyes to his skin to his hair to his clothes, they all were the color of baked sand.

I do not know what it was about him. I still have no idea.

Maybe it was his height. Being 5’2, there was much of the world I was sure I was missing out on. He was 6’4. He seemed to look over everything and everyone. In a crowd, his height could have made him stand out, but it did not. Anyone else with that height could be seen from miles away, but not him. His stature seemed condensed by his chosen hue of brown. Did he choose the brown?

The brown of his skin was not his choice, although I am sure he could have went out more often and gave his skin more color and life. The brown of his eyes were not his choice because he had been given his mother’s delicate brown eyes. The only brown of his life he appeared to have chosen was the brown of his clothing. Every shirt he owned was brown. Every pair of pants he adorned were brown. Every pair of shoes he placed his feet in were brown. Until I got to know him, I thought that maybe he just wore the same thing every day.

I do not know what drew me to the boy in brown or what made me so intrigued by him. Maybe I was envious of more than just his height. I had always wanted to just blend in to my surroundings and fade away into the background. It has been years since I first began to know him and I still have not figured out his secret.

How did he manage to fade into the background without fading away?