Please stop sending me pictures of the sea. I know about the sea. My sister sent me seventeen photographs and in six of them she was standing in front of it, which tells you how seriously she takes this. I have seen blue before. I am a grown man. I own trousers.

This was blue.

I realize that looks like the same word. Bear with me. There was one day, I was going out to buy something, I had the money in my pocket and the whole afternoon available, and then there it was, and I forgot what I was buying. I still haven’t remembered. Once in a while I open a cupboard and think whatever’s missing might remind me, although by now I’ve bought other things and eaten things and generally interfered with the evidence.

Blue with a twist, I told my sister. She asked if I meant greenish. No. Purplish? No, blue, but then more blue, without getting darker or brighter or going anywhere near another color. She thought about this. I could hear her thinking and for a moment I loved her so much I couldn’t speak. Then she said electric blue and I hung up. I called back immediately. She didn’t answer immediately, which was fair.

It was behind the laundrette. Between the drainpipe and the wall, a place where there usually isn’t anything worth looking at, although now I look everywhere and am poorly qualified to say what’s usual. For three days I thought it was a piece of plastic caught on a fence. I went back with scissors. There was no fence. There was a drainpipe, so I have been saying drainpipe since then.

I shouldn’t have told you about the scissors yet.

It was so clear. Clear without being transparent. I couldn’t see through it; I could barely see anything else. I had one foot off the ground and had to remember to put it down. There was more room in my chest. I wanted to give somebody something and checked my pockets, stupidly, as though a present might have appeared in them. All I had was my phone and the money for the thing I’ve forgotten.

Of course I took a photograph. I pointed the phone, pressed the circle, and for one lovely second believed I had dealt with the problem. On the screen I got the wall, the drainpipe, something blue. Quite a nice blue. You could put it on a toothbrush. I looked over the phone and there was the color. I looked at the screen and there was the toothbrush color. Up, down, up again. The wall was excellent in both places. Every stain reproduced faithfully. I changed the exposure until the wall disappeared and the blue turned into something a hotel might put behind its name to suggest enormous towels.

My sister asked to see this photograph.

We couldn’t find it. Breakfast, a meter reading, four pictures of my leg. We checked the deleted folder twice. She held the phone and I stood beside her trying to see around her thumb. I said I definitely took it. She said sometimes things don’t save. I agreed so quickly she looked up at me.

I remember taking it. I also remember a bus door folding open, the blue on the inside of it, and that’s difficult because I’ve told you about the drainpipe. I can move the bus further along the street but it feels dishonest. Leave it there for now. I’m doing my best.

At the paint shop a man called Len gave me a fan of samples. Hundreds of blues. I unfolded them all the way and nearly laughed with relief. Here were people who had been preparing for me. I found the right area immediately, then went back and forth across it until the edges were soft from my thumb. One sample was very close under my thumb. Move the thumb and it went wrong. Len let me take the fan to the window. Then outside. He came to the door when I got as far as the crossing.

We mixed the closest one. He added something white, then something blue, closed the tin in the shaking machine and watched it with me. I liked him. I liked the paint inside his wedding ring, the way he wiped the counter while he was thinking. When he lifted the lid I made a noise that caused him to smile, and then I had to tell him.

More blue, I said. He added blue. Now it was further away. More white? No. Darker, then? No. He rested both hands on the counter and asked which direction I wanted to go. I pointed into the tin. He bent down and looked.

I bought it. I bought several others on later visits. Eleven little tins in my kitchen, each containing a failure and instructions for reproducing it. One is called Absolute Blue. I have scratched that off with my key.

The trouble with almost getting it is that I can spend an entire afternoon on the almost. Wet paint looks different from dry paint, obviously, and a square can be wrong by the window but promising near the sink, so I move it and wait and move it back. Yesterday I held one under my shirt. I thought perhaps all the staring was doing something. Yes, I laughed too. I was standing in the kitchen giving a piece of cardboard some privacy. Then I looked again because what if it worked?

I have tried ink. It sinks into the paper and becomes ink. On shiny paper it sits on top and becomes shiny ink. I had blue on my tongue for two days because I licked a nib to get it going. My sister told me to read the bottle. I had read the bottle. It said blue.

Words ought to be easier. You can say blue without having to manufacture it. But beautiful tells you my opinion, brilliant suggests it was shining, and it wasn’t shining. Please don’t imagine a glow. There was nothing coming off it. It stayed where it was and I stood there wanting to give away everything I had.

Perfect, then. Perfect blue. Although perfect sounds as if looking at it would eventually be finished. I hadn’t even begun getting used to it when I lost it.

It was a beatureful blue. That’s a typing mistake. I left it because before I recognized what I’d meant, I thought I might have got somewhere. Beatureful. Beatifual. I keep watching the wrong letters. I’ve said blue into a towel until it stopped being a word and waited for it to come back meaning the right thing. It came back normal. I washed the towel. There are still things I do normally.

I need to explain that I was happy. Before the paint shop and the scissors, I was happy. I stood there smiling, I remember that much, and when someone passed me I moved aside without getting irritated. Lately I get irritated just hearing someone prepare to suggest turquoise.

Now the day itself is going. I used to have a Thursday. My sister said it rained that Thursday and I said yes, the rain, exactly, while hearing myself add rain to a perfectly dry street. So I gave up Thursday. Yesterday a dog appeared in the memory. I sat down and told myself I wasn’t entitled to a dog just because a dog would make the street more convincing.

The color is still clear. Except when I check, I check it against my memory, which is where I keep it. I fetch the same thing twice and announce that they match. I’ve been doing this for weeks. I don’t know how to check any other way.

Perhaps I dreamed it. I’d accept a dream. I have a bed, I’m willing to put in the hours. What frightens me is that I might never have seen it even there, that I invented having seen it and then began to miss it. Is that possible? I keep trying it with other things. I imagine an apple I haven’t eaten and try to miss the taste. Nothing. I want an apple, that’s all. With the blue I could put my head on the table.

On Sunday my sister said there would be potatoes at six. I said I was busy. She repeated the time, and I went, carrying a sample I’d trimmed the name off. Before dinner I put it on the table. She said yes, that was blue. I asked her to imagine it being a little more, a little further into itself, and she put the salt on it so she could set down a plate.

I watched that salt shaker through most of dinner. Once she asked me something and I answered the question I thought she’d asked, and she said my name, quite loudly. I looked up.

Was I there? she said.

Where?

When you saw it.

I started to say no, then tried to remember whether I’d been walking alone.

You used to call me about things, she said. A pigeon outside the station. Remember that pigeon? You rang me at work. I asked what was funny about it and you said I had to see it, but you went on trying to tell me anyway. I had a customer standing right in front of me.

I didn’t remember the pigeon. I wanted to. It seemed unbearable that she should have kept a whole phone call I’d thrown away. I pushed the salt toward her and tried to tell her about the color again, starting with how clear it was, and halfway through she reached across and rubbed something off my ear. Paint. I’d washed my hands before coming out and missed my ear.

When I got home I cut a square from a cereal box and painted it with the closest mixture. It dried wrong. I picked it up to snap it and found the raspberries on the back, part of the serving suggestion, three enormous raspberries leaning into a spoon. I wrote her name underneath. Then: I made this for you.

I nearly wrote that it wasn’t the color. She knows.

It’s in an envelope now. I’m taking it over. I’ve put my shoes on and taken the scissors out of my coat, but every time I look away from the envelope something happens at the edge of it, where the paper bends around the cardboard. I look back and it’s white. I look away and I could swear. No, I won’t swear. I’ve been much too certain about things.

You would like it. That’s what I keep trying to say. If I could get it to you without it going through the camera or the ink or whatever happens between saying blue and hearing it, you would understand why I have spent so long standing here with my shoes on. It was blue. It was such a beautiful blue. I don’t even know if I saw it and I want to see it again so badly that I’ve been turning this envelope in my hands until my sister’s name has begun to rub off.

I’ll have to write it again before I go.