TUMO x h-pem | 'Dreaming in colors' by Ellen Petrosyan

Nonfiction 


The white walls of my bedroom are full of drawings. I drew them myself when I was a kid and each of them tell a story about me.

Paintings drawn with a yellow pencil remind me of my childhood. I began drawing them when I first started dreaming in yellow. I was dreaming about becoming a sunflower. When I was four years old, we had a garden full of sunflowers that my mother would take care of. I used to fill my tiny, red bucket with fresh water to give to them. My dream grew with the flowers.

The August sunset’s rays make the orange butterflies on my wall shine even brighter. It looks like they escape their papers, flying all over my room, filling the summer air with their succulent color. My seven-­year-­old self couldn’t stop dreaming of becoming a butterfly and flying to where the wind would take her. At that time I would roam through the fields in pursuit of a single butterfly to follow everywhere. The butterfly would fly, land on flowers sometimes, and keep flying like the carefree little girl I wanted to be. I could look at it until it disappeared behind the scorching sun. Thus, I kept drawing butterflies with an orange pencil, wishing to turn into one of them, to be as light as they were.

As I grew older, my dreams grew with me. With time, my tiny, orange butterfly wings turned into the wings of a big blue bird. Pictures drawn with blue pencil on my wall remind me of my teenage dream of becoming a bird and conquering the heavens above. I remember lying on the grass, looking up at the sky and smiling at the birds, feeling happy when seeing a flock of them. I was watching them being high and free. I was obsessed with dreaming about the peaks that only birds could reach. And how impossible it seemed to me to fly one day.

Time was flying faster than me, and I was still walking on the grass with those imagined wings on my back. They were falling under my feet and holding me from moving on. But I kept walking and appeared somewhere I had never been before. It was a field of a thousand sunflowers, millions of butterflies flying over my head and a flock of birds hovering and drawing circles above the field in the purple summer sky. I gathered my broken pieces and turned my dreams into a purple one. I kept drawing with only a purple pencil, and in my paintings, I found a ballet dancer. I kept drawing her, her free spirit, her movement. Now, I've stopped drawing her, because I finally am her. I learned to dance the way she does, as beautifully as the sunflowers, as lightly as the butterflies, as high as the blue birds.

Now I realize that my life began when my dreams did.