“Why is that building purple?” she asked. “Why does the light turn purple at night?” I held her hip with my right hand and looked outside. Far into the night was the dark façade of the building she had been pointing to. The lights were purple, running in circles around the upper rim of the building’s roof.
Three glasses of whiskey where already bubbling in my head. “Why?” she mumbled in a soft voice close to my ear. I couldn’t figure how to respond so I just said, “I don’t know’.
As I rode the subway on my way home the following morning feeling the remnants of the previous night’s alcohol still lingering in my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about those purple lights. Someone had placed them there, someone had decided they had to be purple, not red, not blue, not green, but purple and I couldn’t stop asking myself why.