I had a friend. We were young. His favorite color was blue, like baby blue. He wore a lot of baby blue.

At his parents’ cabin in Pennsylvania there was the pink room, and the blue room (in addition to all the other rooms). They were named for the color of the wall-to-wall carpet in each. One carpet was like faded hot pink. One was like deep baby blue. And we—me and the friend—would sleep in the pink room and tell each other silly things and play safety and board games. And the grass outside the house was green and the forest around it was also green, but the overall mood was brown, like mud, like the fur of this bear we once saw in the woods near the house, and which we walked very slowly away from until we turned a corner, and then ran.

I am older now and I’ve noticed I wear a lot of blue things—navy blue things and baby blue things and other shades of blue things. But when asked (though I don’t get asked much) I still say my favorite color is forest green, because back then it couldn’t have been blue, because that was already his color.

Peter is a writer in New York who writes about depressing things.