My life began with the colour blue.

My mother was in a hospital room with blue walls and wore a blue hospital gown. She pushed me out as she lay on a bed dressed in blue sheets. 

My newborn clothes were a plain navy blue onesie and a navy blue cap that clad my tiny head and had the word ‘boy’ written on it electric blue. Twenty-eight years later, the picture still hung proudly in my parent’s living room in a royal blue frame that had the words “It’s a boy!” written in baby blue.

Every year for my birthday, my parents got me a blue cake with variations of boyish paraphernalia. There was a blue cake with a football perched on top, a blue basketball jersey cake, a blue car cake, a superhero clad in blue with muscles that bulged in disturbing ways. 

Every birthday came with a cake that served as a reminder of the kind of life I was born to live since the ultrasound announced I was a boy—a life filled with blues. Different shades of it, but ultimately blue.

But my life was never the unadulterated blue that it was supposed to be. If I tainted it with other acceptable colours, it would’ve been better; expected, even. Black here, grey there. Perfect.

When I was seven years old and scraped my knee as I fell from my bike, my tears flowed faster than the blood. My father said to me in a voice that sounded like metal rubbing against metal, “You’re a man, don’t cry!” But instead of swallowing my tears, I cried harder. I tainted my palette with pink.

When I chose culinary club in school and dismissed the options of taekwondo and engineering club, my father asked with disgust smearing his face, “What is a man doing cooking?” I replied, “I enjoy it and want to be a full adult who can take care of myself when I grow up.” I tainted my palette with lavender.

Every time I spoke with a flick of my hand, I tainted it with pastels.

When I allowed my emotions to leak through my lips instead of forcing them down my throat and letting them swim in my belly, I tainted my palette with a warm orangey yellow that felt like the sun on my skin after leaving a cold room.

The more I tainted it, the less blue there was. The more I tainted it, the more I saw the eyes of my parents and those around me widen. The more I saw them flinch with every taint.

The more I tainted it, the more I felt at home in myself.

But every birthday still serves as a reminder. 

Another birthday and without fail, even though they are miles away, I stare at the blue cake my parents had delivered to my door.

It’s a sea of blue with an imitation of a beer bottle and a tuxedo. I don’t drink beer. I prefer wine. I’ve never worn a tuxedo in my life.

I throw it in the trash and watch as it breaks apart.