the colour of a shadow on white.

It's 2am and I'm staring at the wall next to my desk lamp. Not the lit part — the part where the light falls off.

There's this patch of wall that should be white but it isn't. It's not grey either. Grey is what you get when you mix black and white, and this isn't that. It's more like — if I had to mix it, I'd start with a tiny dot of ultramarine, then a whisper of quinacridone violet, then enough white to make it transparent. And I'd still be wrong because the colour is also somehow warm at the very edge where it meets the light. Like a bruise that's almost healed.

I tried to sample it from a photo once. The eyedropper gave me #b8b5c4. That's not even close. That's just a grey with a little blue in it. The real thing isn't a hex code. The real thing is the way your eye keeps second-guessing itself.

Shadows on white are never one colour. They're a whole conversation between the light source and the surface and whatever is casting the shadow. A curtain makes a different shadow than a book. A hand makes a shadow that's warmer because of the blood underneath the skin.

I painted a white wall once for a class exercise. I used Payne's grey and titanium white and it came out dead. The instructor said "look again" and I didn't know what she meant. Now I think she meant: look until you see the lavender, the blue, the faintest peach at the edge. Look until the word "white" stops meaning anything.