Little girls want pink nail polish

Little girls want pink

The world wants little girls to want pink, not black, blue or anything else

Pink, pink, pink

What if I want purple

Purple is okay, but it’s not pink

Why is it that every little girl’s first favorite color is a half-hearted attempt at making red?

Why is it that every little girl wants their room to look like the red that could have been, the red that didn’t make it, the red that wants us to know it tried

Why do little girls want everything to be an almost color?

Pink mixes red and white

We can agree that white is not red at all

It’s not a color, it’s an idea

It’s the idea of taking something and blending it until it’s not what it was meant to be

It’s the idea of maybe

It makes a lighter, toned down version of what it could have been, it dilutes it, it covers it up, it buries it like the secret you don’t want anyone to know but it sits on your face like a scar, but you don’t have the heart to explain how it got there

Red is passion, white is nothing

When you mix passion with the idea of nothing, you get lazy

You get almost

You get, “I tried but then I failed”

Failure is okay, but not when it’s all little girls want

Pink is a fine color, it comes in many shades and it looks pretty

But why do parents buy little girls “pretty”?

Shoes are pretty, makeup is pretty, clothes are pretty, art is pretty

Our parents are buying us pretty so we can see what it looks like

We can’t copy something we haven’t seen yet so they fill our rooms with all the pretty that money can buy

I said art was pretty, you look at art, you don’t touch you just look at it and you think about it

Girls are pretty like art, the world’s eyes look at girls like a perfectly garnished entrée, which is kinda like art

You don’t touch girls because they’ll get dirty, unclean, but you do it anyway, the same way you touch something you aren’t supposed to and hope the security guard doesn’t see that you did it, but you might get a pass

It depends on how much the world thinks the art is worth

You think about girls, but girls aren’t supposed to do the thinking

But I’m a girl and I’ve thought too long about art and what I think it means

I have to talk about pink, that’s more my speed

Little girls have pink thrust upon them the moment they bloom forth from that pink expanse of life called our mother’s womb

The balloons are pink

The hat is pink

The first thing girls see when those little eyes open is a pink blanket and pink footprints on a piece of paper that tells them they are “girl”

And to the world girl means pink

But what if a little girl wanted black or blue or grey?

What if they want to explore what other colors are out there?

Not just almost red, not just I tried

Boys get blue. It’s a stand alone, but it works in combination, a tag team, a joint effort

Society backs its boys like a hardcover textbook that boys are supposed to read

Pink tried so it doesn’t have to read the textbook; pink only tries, it’s not supposed to do

I wanna be more than pink

I don’t want to just try; I want to win; I want to fail

I want to see what colors I can squeeze on my palette, not just the ones wrapped in plastic wrap for a portrait that doesn’t even look like me

I want to read my own labels and decide my own color

I was born pink but that doesn’t mean I can’t be something else

~Sabrina