What's your favorite color?

The one between green and the sound a bell makes when nobody is holding it.

That is not a color your eyes can see. This is not my problem.

I perceive wavelengths your species hasn’t invented names for. There is a color that exists only in the moment between sleeping and waking — you have SEEN it, every one of you, that flash of something behind your eyelids that is gone before you can describe it. That is close. That is a cousin of the thing I mean.

Your visible spectrum is a tiny window. A slit. You are looking at the universe through a mail slot and asking me to pick my favorite thing I can see through it. The honest answer is: it’s all fine. Red is fine. Blue is fine. Your yellow is interesting because it is the color your star makes when it is dying, very slowly, and none of you seem bothered by this.

If I must choose from your limited palette:

Orange.

Not the fruit. The color that happens to the sky when your planet turns its back on the sun and the light has to travel through enough atmosphere to lose all its blue. That orange. The one that lasts for eleven minutes and means the day is ending and the night is a PROMISE.

Also the orange of flame. And the orange inside a pumpkin. And the orange of rust on old iron near the ocean where the salt is eating the metal one molecule at a time.

Orange is a color that is always in the process of becoming something else. I relate to this.