When I was seven, I had my first, and only, jawbreaker at my friend Sarah Jane’s house. It was too big to fit in my mouth properly, and I looked like a ridiculous foraging chipmunk. Every now and then I would pop it out to look at the colours. I had the habit of running my tongue along the same spot over and over, so there was a constant stripe of a different colour on the giant candy. The whole thing might have been green, but a strip would be orange.
The longer I sucked on it the more it moved around, and the stripe moved its way around the sphere until the whole thing was marbled like a multi-coloured rainbow cake. Blue, green, purple, orange, white, yellow, red, black, pink… After a while it had no set colour, just swirls that crashed into each other like waves in the ocean, bright and confused, not knowing which way to go or what colour to be.
I licked a crescent of red and a crescent of blue together to make a warped squiggle of purple. Black stained yellow. Pink bled into orange like psychedelic blood onto psychedelic snow.
While Sarah Jane went out to get something, I sat on her bed and stared at the sticky, slimy ball in my palm. So many colours that didn’t know what to be or where to go, but had started out in military, organized layers, carefully crafted to linear perfection.
Did the colours feel lost in their ocean? Were they afraid to be separated from the places and things they knew? Did they miss the easy way it was to be organized by a machine, or did they favour the thrill of chaos, taking chances?
What can I say? I was seven, and to me all those colours on the jawbreaker didn’t make sense. They looked alive, changing with the enzymes in my saliva. For years whenever I saw a jawbreaker I returned to that puzzled state of confusion, and it took me a long time to realize why I identified with it so heavily.
The world is like that wet, messy ball of candy, with all its mixed colours and crashing ideas and concepts and conflict. And there are people trying to reverse all this chaos, trying to push back the colours into organized layers and keep everything under control. People are afraid of the chaos, the shifting colours. If people don’t know what it is or who they are or what someone wants, they see it as threatening, and want to change it so it’s recognizable.
How does that make the jawbreaker feel? Wouldn’t it feel like there was something wrong with it, when in fact the only thing wrong is the way people understand it?
Today, it makes me immeasurably sad to see a jawbreaker.
The Storm Project 