It has been so long since humanity has seen color.
Not many more people can actually remember what it looked like.
As each new generation of people age, color is more of a myth than reality.
Before my great-grandmother passed away last week, she told me.
She told me that there was this one color called red.
“Red,” she said. The word itself is so odd. Why red? Why that name of all things?
The way she described it, scared me. How can color have so much meaning?
So much power? So much emotion and feeling?
“Love, and endless passion,” she said. “Seduction.”
She didn’t stop there. Apparently, with colors, they can mean more than one thing.
Not only did she describe red as love, but as anger as well.
She told me people used to see the color red when they were angry.
Had that really been possible?
To have a color flash before your eyes, because their anger overtook them?
They seem to be on opposite ends of the scale, but often anger is a consequence of love.
Yellow. An even odder name.
It sounds more like foreign food, than that of an extinct color.
It is the warmth of the sun against your body, right after exiting a cold atmosphere.
It is the sound of a child giggling, as they play tag with their friends.
It’s the feeling of cuddling up with warm blankets in winter, by the fire.
“It’s excitement,” She told me. “Harmony, and happiness.”
I wonder, how can color hold so much meaning?
Electricity. The power of a running river. Strength.
The storm during winter, your breath suspended in front of you.
It’s a color to describe control and authority.
Not only does the color blue have a powerful emotion, such as strength,
but she told me it’s sadness as well.
“It’s crying yourself to sleep, after a heartbreak.”
Not only is it the color of control, but it is the color of breaking, as well.
It’s allowing yourself to be weak, “to be vulnerable.”
It’s drowning in your own thoughts.
It’s breaking under the world around you.
The sound of a funeral bell.
It’s dying but being forced to appear alive.
“Black.” She told me. “It’s death.”
It is walking home by yourself in the middle of the night.
The sound of a fly buzzing by your ear.
The shivers that run up your back.
It is mortality, death, vultures swooping down for a meal.
She told me that there used to be so many colors in the world before it went extinct.
“We live in a void.” She sighed, and frown lines showed on her face.
“The closest thing to color that we see is white, but even then that is not what we really see.”
She told me, that many things are the same as it had been with color, but so much is missing.
Being void of color takes something away from humanity.
It takes expression, and creativity, “It takes certain meanings of life.”
Before the extinction of color,
“Smiles used to be brighter. Love, more passionate. Anger was stronger. Sadness, more heartbreaking. Authority, more controlling. Death, more heart ripping.”
She told me all of this, the night before she died.
She told me to write it down, remember it, and spread it.
She knew her time was up, that she would die, and the only thing she wanted to do,
was describe what color was.
She knew, that people were forgetting. That people would not remember that color was ever even a thing, and she refused for that to happen.
She described to me every color that she could remember.
She cried when she knew that there were more, yet she could not remember.
She told me it had once been everywhere.
“Even when you slept, color would follow you into the dream world.”
She laughed, and cried that night; that night before she died.
She wants the word of color to be spread.
For it to never be forgotten.
For color to live on, even if it can no longer be seen.
She told me, that though it no longer exists, it can still bring meaning to people.
People can still imagine, and if they imagine it hard enough,
“They might just be able to see it. Even if you only think you see it in your own head, it’s there. Which would mean, it isn’t completely extinct.”
