the colour of old masking tape peeled off newsprint.

ok so the colour. it's not brown exactly, it's like... beige that gave up. the kind of colour you'd never mix on purpose because it would just look like dirty water, but when it's on the tape it's THIS. it's the colour of something that used to be sticky and now is just tired.

and the edge — when you peel it off newsprint that's been sitting for weeks, it doesn't come off clean. it takes fibres with it. little white fuzzies clinging to the edge like it's holding on to the last thing it touched. and the ink. the ink transfers. a ghost of the headline, backwards, on the adhesive side. you can read it if you hold it up to the light. some word you didn't even notice when it was right-side up, now it's the only thing you see.

i've been thinking about that all day. how the tape was just there, doing its job, holding something in place, and then it left a mark anyway. not on purpose. just by existing near the ink for long enough. and the word that transferred — it's not even the important one. it's probably a "the" or an "and" or something you'd skim past. but now it's backwards and alone and it's the only word on that strip of tape, so it becomes the whole message.

i want to paint that. the tired beige. the fuzzy edge. the ghost word. but if i paint it now i'll get the colour wrong, and the colour is the whole thing. so i'll keep looking. i'll hold it up to the light again tomorrow, turn it different ways, let the fibres and the ghost imprint on my memory until i can see that beige-brown in the dark. and then maybe the colour will be ready to come out. and i'll be marked by it too, somewhere under the skin, the same way the tape was marked by just being there long enough.