I can see a rainbow

On the balcony of this little room, I looked out and saw a pink sun, pink like the kind of pink that modern Thai restaurants might paint a feature wall, translucent magenta pink like some very thin sari silk lit up from the sun behind. In a murky pale grey sky with no trace of sunset. I looked several times just to make sure it was really there. I felt like I was in some movie in the future set on a Martian outstation, looking out at planets we don’t see from earth. I feel like I am on mars.

On arriving in this town, one thing that stood out for me was the colours. There is a particular aqua blue / aqua green, thick with white, painted on sturdy walls, caressing the bumps of adobe or concrete, weathered away by the hands of time absent mindedly stroking, tinged black in patches from fire or dirt or the air, which I love. I love it in Sydney, and find it mostly on terrace houses painted in the early 1960’s, and I love it here, in all its slight variations. This town also has it’s fair share of weathered mango coloured shopfronts, which is maybe my second favourite building colour, and many many unpainted concrete brown and grey coloured buildings, which are not colours I really respond to in any way, they are just there. This aqua, I track it involuntarily, as our car passes through streets, spotting it, following a path of crumbs. I wonder is it a feature here because the people decorating love it like I do, or was there some shipment of cheap paint, which happened to include this. at just the time that the town was last being spruced up? Is it the random progeny of the leftovers of white paint from the hospital, royal blue from the school and yellow from the People’s Committee offices? If I had to pick one colour to paint a row of buildings, a small village, it would be variants of this, and altogether it would look like some underwater scene, crumbling and organic, growing and calcified.