This usually happened with my roommates. They quickly became my yellows. I don’t know how long I spent talking with my roommates at ridiculous hours of the night. They were like detachable brothers. That’s just it. I even called them that back then: hospital brothers, brothers with an expiration date. The intensity of our relationships was the sort that exists between brothers, and our friendships were very close.
But as the years went by I realized that the words brother, friend, close acquaintance weren’t enough.
I remember a day in the hospital when two or three of us Eggheads were talking about our roommates. Someone defined them as angels; someone else said they were friends. Another guy and I said: “They’re yellows.” It came out at the same time. I don’t know why we said yellows, but we felt strongly that this was the word that defined them. I’m a firm believer in chance and luck, and I think that chance is much stronger than luck. And I don’t know if it was luck or chance, but I think that the only word that can truly define this concept is yellow.
I’ve never understood why the concept of friendship hasn’t evolved. Sometimes I read books about the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, or about the beginning of this century, and they always talk about friendship in the same way: A friend is always a friend. Friends are friends and the relationship between friends is fairly similar at all times. On the other hand, the concepts of the couple or of the family have changed. The way in which we relate to a partner or a close family member nowadays has nothing to do with the way in which we related to them in the Middle Ages: Roles, customs, everything has evolved.
I think that this is one of the bad things about our society. The concept of friendship, the role of the friend: These need to change for the technological age we live in. I think that it’s impossible to maintain contact now with friends in the same way you could in past decades. Everybody loses friends every year, and the excuses are very varied: We live in different countries; I got a new job; I don’t have time to meet up; we only message each other from time to time; we were only friends in school or college.
Losing a friend is always connected with stopping seeing them. Friends are defined above all as people one sees, people you see a lot of in your life. Can you be friends with someone you never see, someone you never meet up with? In theory it’s impossible. In theory.
For example, I always met my Egghead friends only in the hospital: It was a golden rule. We helped each other, we looked after each other, but when we left the hospital we had a pact not to see each other again. It’s not that we forgot each other—quite the opposite, we kept each other inside ourselves—but we didn’t need to keep on seeing each other. There were other things that tied us together.
It took me a long time to realize it, but these were the foundations of the yellows. One fine day I saw it clearly. There are friends who give you friendship; there are love affairs that give you passion, sex, or love; and, finally, there are yellows.
Perhaps you’ll ask me if what I’m trying to say is that the yellows are substitutes for friends. The answer is no. Friends, traditional friends, still exist; we all have them. But there’s a new rung on the ladder, a new concept: the yellows.
Everybody has yellows, but the problem is that until now there hasn’t been a word to define them. I’m sure that yellows have always existed, but have just been lumped in with friends. Or sometimes a yellow turned into a lover. A yellow is in between a lover and a friend, and that’s why things so often get confused.
Before I carry on, I’ll give a definition of yellows. A definition of what I’ve explained up till now.
Yellow: A person who is special in your life. Yellows are found among your friends and lovers. It’s not necessary to see them regularly or keep in touch with them.
According to this definition, how is it possible to distinguish between a friend and a yellow? Is there any way of knowing who is a friend and who is a yellow? In fact there is. You need a bit of practice and you need to know yourself quite well. Yellows are a reflection of you; they have some of the things you lack, and knowing them causes a qualitative leap forward in your life.
I’m going to tell you a little more about the yellows. Imagine that you are in an airport, in an airport in a foreign city. There’s a delay, two or three hours. You’re alone in this city and suddenly you start speaking to someone (a boy or a girl). To begin with it might just seem like a trivial conversation, but little by little you notice there’s something between you; I’m not talking about love or sex, I’m talking about the feeling that you’ve met someone (a stranger) to whom you can tell the most intimate things and who understands you and advises you in a different and special way.
The plane’s got to take off, so you’ve got to separate (in the best-case scenario you’ll swap email addresses or cellphone numbers) and stop seeing each other. Maybe you’ll write; maybe you’ll send a message; maybe you’ll never see each other again.
Traditionally, you couldn’t consider such a person a friend—developing a friendship takes time, years. But maybe this person has given you more than a friend of six or seven years has; you’ve exchanged confidences and intense emotions. Also, one of the characteristics of a friendship is that seeing each other, regularly or at least assiduously, is important. And here you are meeting a stranger who affects you and makes you feel better, though you’ll probably never see him again.
Normally such a situation causes sadness, a feeling of loss rather than gain, a feeling that you’ve found something and know that you have lost it. But really what you’ve done is gain a yellow. One of the twenty-three yellows you will have in your life.
So, what? A yellow is a stranger who understands me? Not exactly. A yellow can be someone you know, a yellow can be a friend who one day steps up the ladder to the level of yellow. It doesn’t have to be a stranger. All it has to be is someone special who makes you feel special.
The most important thing is that a yellow doesn’t need telephone calls, doesn’t need to be looked after for years, doesn’t need to be seen often (just once is enough for someone to become a yellow). So maybe there are lots of those people you don’t see very often, who you don’t think are your friends anymore because you don’t have time to see them; maybe lots of them are your yellows.
Yellow is the word to define people who change your life (a lot or a little) and whom you may or may not ever see again. It’s like a new category among those who used to be called “best friends.”
Most of all, there’s nothing random about yellows. What I mean is that in this hypothetical airport it’s perfectly possible to recognize a yellow (there are ways of recognizing them) and strike up a conversation to see if you’re right, if your radar’s working properly. Yellows sense each other, realize that you could be one. A relationship with a yellow doesn’t begin by accident.
Haven’t you ever noticed when you walk down the street that someone catches your attention? It’s not necessarily a question of sexual attraction or beauty, but this person makes you feel you have to talk to him or her, to say something. It’s a feeling, not love, and you suppose it can’t be friendship, because friendship needs time or a job or a hobby in common. What you feel comes from seeing a yellow, being lucky enough to meet one of the yellows in your world.
What I’d like to happen is that when this book is published, someone comes up to me (or comes up to you) and says: “Would you like to be my yellow?” It would be great to be able to be like that with people. And because one of the characteristics of a yellow (although this isn’t absolutely obligatory) is to be a complete stranger, it would be perfect.
But let’s not get too happy. You still need to know how to find yellows, how to notice them. And know the ways (but not the rules) you need to get along with them.
Everybody knows how to get along with friends, with a partner or with a lover (although there are a thousand and one possible ways, of course). I’m going to talk about my way of dealing with yellows. In other words, what I’m going to
give you is the theory, the organization, and the list, and, using that as a base, everyone can find the most appropriate way of dealing with their yellows.
Where did I get this list of how to be with yellows? Once again, from my time in the hospital. Like I said before, in the hospital you’re likely to find quite a few potential yellows: Living through such an extreme situation and spending so much time together over such a short period makes it more likely for a yellow to appear.
I think that my list derives from experience, from things that we do without knowing that we do them. It’s amazing, the number of things we do without knowing that we do them. A friend of mine, Eder, wrote a story where he talked about “the three seconds that we manage to look at the sun.” It’s true; although it is probable that nobody has ever told you that you can’t look at the sun for more than three seconds, you somehow know that you can’t and so you don’t do it. It’s strange, the sun is always above us, looking at us, heating us, and we can’t bear to gaze at it for any length of time. The sun is the greatest yellow. We feel it, we notice it, we know that it’s there, but we shouldn’t look at it all that much.
Something similar happened in the hospital. I remember that whenever I left after being there for a long time I would say goodbye to all the people and not feel sad. I knew that they would stay there because that’s where they were meant to be at that moment, and that I was going home because that’s where I was meant to be. Sometimes it happened the other way around: They’d go and I would stay. I didn’t feel like I was abandoning them or that I was losing them. I just felt that these roommates or these Eggheads had looked after me, listened to me, supported me, and had helped me grow. And more than anything else, that they had embraced me.
And this is how we reach another of the characteristics of the yellows, perhaps the one that most distinguishes them from friends: feeling, touching, stroking. I’ve never understood why we touch our friends so little—proof of the lack of evolution that there has been in friendship. Someone can be your friend and maybe never manage to come closer to you than six inches, or never give you a big hug, or never see you asleep or watch you wake up. To see how someone wakes up, how anyone wakes up, creates a sensation of closeness, of seeing someone being born, seeing them return to life; it’s like a thousand, a hundred thousand conversations.
All the Eggheads, when we were in the hospital, sleeping next to one another, saw each other wake up a lot. They saw me wake up; I saw them wake up. Nobody should have to wait for a trip or an illness to see how someone sleeps and wakes up. It’s something you can look for. The important thing to remember is that yellows are not just friends; friendship has very little feeling in it, very little touching, very little stroking.
I think that in friendship talking is overrated and touching is underrated; the physical distance that separates two friends isn’t thought about enough.
I’ve always thought that it’s unfair that your partner should get 95 percent of all your physical contact. Nobody would put 95 percent of their money in a single bank, but you put 95 percent of your caresses, of your hugs, into a single person. This is where mistakes are born. This is why there are so many infidelities. This is why people feel so alone; this is why you notice a lack of physical contact, of affection, of caresses.
Now that we’ve got to this point the question has to be asked: Can you have sex with a yellow? And another question is also going through your head: If we’re talking about yellows, do we mean men or women?
Maybe these questions are only occurring to you now, or maybe they’ve been there from the first moment that I started to talk about this concept. Be that as it may, I have to make it clear that my reply is conditioned by what I think, by the way in which I have found and cultivated my yellows.
Yellows are defined by affection, stroking, and hugging. When I talk about sleeping together and waking up together, I’m talking about loss (sleep) and waking up (rebirth); I’m not talking about sex. It isn’t convenient to have sex with a yellow. Of course you could, but I think that the important thing about a yellow, about the concept of yellowness, about the essence of yellowhood, is that yellows occupy space that had previously been taken up by friendship. They get 40 percent physical contact, whereas beforehand friends got only maybe 3 percent.
Now that we’re here, I think it might be a good idea to redefine yellows.
Yellow: A person who is special in your life. Yellows are found among your friends and lovers. It’s not necessary to see them regularly or keep in touch with them. Relationships between yellows are based on affection, stroking, and hugging. They have privileges that previously were the unique possession of a partner.
I will try to make a list of things that can be done with a yellow. The list, like everything in this book, needn’t be obeyed, still less followed slavishly. Of course, each person has to decide what works and does not work for him. It’s not a philosophy, it’s not a religion; it’s just lessons from cancer applied to life, and that’s how it should be understood. So there’s not really any room for debate. I know that someone’s going to say: “You can sleep with a yellow.” Someone else will think: “Yellows are your life partners.” Another person would say: “All this nonsense about yellows doesn’t make any sense. I’ve always had friends that I’ve done all this stuff with that you say you’ve got to do with your yellows.” My response to all this: “That’s fine, great.” Everyone has their own friends and their own way of dealing with them. Like one of the hospital psychologists said: “Luck means being just the way you are. The shame of it is that you can’t understand what other people are like.”
Let’s carry on, but first I need to answer the question about whether yellows are male or female. You can have girl yellows and boy yellows; what matters is the concept of yellowness, something that encompasses both sexes.
Back to the question of what you can or can’t do with a yellow, which I’m sure you want to know. Here’s a four-point list. We’ll add more as we go on.
I should make it clear that they’re not in any order, nor do you have to do all these things with a yellow. The important thing about yellows is having the feeling of having met a fellow soul, a person who marks you (an evolution in friendship).
After you’ve convinced yourself that someone can be a yellow, you can try these things with them:
1. Speaking
In this, yellows aren’t much different from other kinds of relationships. Perhaps there’s a slight difference if you’re speaking to someone you don’t know and what made you start speaking was the suspicion that this person was a yellow.
With yellows you feel that you can tell them hidden secrets, you can open yourself up. You can call them at any hour of the day or night. You feel that sometimes you don’t need to maintain contact; you can spend months and months without saying anything and when you see them again everything is just as it always has been.
Words are overrated; it’s not their quantity but their intensity that matters. There are yellows who are good for two conversations and yellows who are good for fifty.
2. Hugging and Stroking
This world would work better if there were more hugging and stroking. In the hospital we supported each other, we hugged each other. (The first thing you lose when you get ill is the hugs; people swap them for pats on the back. Sometimes we thought that we wouldn’t die of cancer but of being patted so much on the back.)
A yellow hug lasts about two minutes. You feel the other person’s breathing. It’s important to feel their breathing.
As far as the stroking is concerned: Where to stroke? Wherever you want. On the hand, on the face, on the arm, on the ear, on the leg. Wherever you think you should stroke. I think it’s one of the great mistakes we make, not to stroke each other more often, to feel the warmth of a hand, the temperature and touch of a hand on you.
I remember in the hospital we used to stroke each other. It was something natural, normal. It was simply and purely affection; there was n
o other connotation attached to it.
I think that in this particular aspect of things, yellows take on a role that has always been that of the partner. But there’s no point being scared or jealous or even in thinking that you’ll be misunderstood; all you have to do is change the way you think about things. Like I said before, the brain needs the right combination to let new ideas come in. You have to understand something before you judge it.
Stroking and hugging are two things that friendship doesn’t include, although it’s the natural next step for friends. Yellows have taken this step and enjoy its results.
3. Sleeping and Waking
Half of a yellow life is watching someone wake up. You don’t have to be in the same bed, you could be in two beds, but you have to get into an environment where yellows can sleep and wake up with each other after seven or eight hours. How many people have you slept with in your life without having sex with them? Was it on a journey? Ask yourself these questions. I’m sure there won’t be that many. And if you narrow it down to the people you’ve shared a bed with, I’m sure it’ll be even fewer. This is another error that society makes: thinking that sleeping and waking are something functional, when they’re actually something as important as lunch or tea.
Everyone eats with their friends. Want to have lunch? Want to come around for tea? It’s something friends do. That and going on trips together. But, shall we sleep together? Hey, why not wake up together? It’s not normal, but it’s absolutely necessary. I’d say more: It’s vital.
People think that sleeping is something so personal that it needs to be solitary or else shared via sex, but that’s another area where the yellows win.