All the colors in the world can be made by mixing blue, red, and yellow. Her father told her that. Black and white weren’t colors, he’d said. They were neutrals, and neutrals didn’t count. So the only three you had to remember where blue, red, yellow. Everything else derived from those three.

She thinks maybe that is why she started to paint the concentric circles. Sure she liked the pattern, the one circle inside of the next inside of the next, but she didn’t ever vary the colors. It was always blue, red, yellow, inside to outside. She’d wait until one color dried before painting the next. Couldn’t have the colors blend accidently, didn’t want any orange or purple or green intruding upon her masterpiece. Cause blue, red, yellow was the opposite of destiny. Blue, red, yellow signified infinite possibility, and endless array of potential, thousands upon thousands of colors just waiting to be unleashed if and when one so chose, and even as a child with watercolor paints she understood that deciding one’s own path was important.

So time after time she took her brush and painted blue, red, yellow in broad strokes across papers and canvases and walls. They were the only colors she would ever need. Her father told her so.