To See Color
They say once you meet the person you’re meant to be with forever, the entire fabric of the physical world will shift right before your eyes. It’s said to be the stuff of magic and fairytales, the kind from the really thick books with lots of words, filled to the brim with unnecessary adjectives and little tiny pictures on the corner of the occasional page. You never really thought of it that way, but everyone else did, because people like to dumb down things that are complex to make them easier to understand and more appealing to the public.
Honestly, the thought had barely crossed your mind.
The first bit of your life passed in swirls of colors you now recognize as monochrome and, well, actually not colorful at all. To you, and to others who haven’t found love, you never knew the difference. You never knew there was more out there to see. After all, how does one know what they’re missing if they’ve never had it?
Red was the first color you saw. The word wasn’t unfamiliar to you, no, in fact, it brought you back to your childhood where your grandmother would run her fingers through tiny corkscrew curls cropped close to your head and tell you that you had the most beautiful red hair she’d ever seen in her life. But the color? It was as unfamiliar to you as darkness is to the sun.
The moment she entered the cafe time slowed. Your vision shifted and altered just like everyone had said, and the unfamiliar view seeped into your eyes. The unfamiliarity stained her cheeks and lips with passion that made your heart unable to decide whether it’d like to beat fast, slow, or stop altogether. As she approached you, it grew brighter and felt like fire to see, and when she spoke to you it burst with flair, popping and sizzling, not with sound but with sight.
The more she spoke to you, the more you grew to love what you saw, and the more you desired to see more, though at the time, you had no idea there was more to see. By the time you left, the sun had long since set and you walked alone to the place you came to know as home. Upon entering it, and passing by a decorative mirror hung by the door, you finally understood what your grandmother was referring to, and smiled at your reflection, watching the your cheeks tint to match your hair. You spent the rest on the night staring at a vase of 3 roses, all of which were tainted with life and passion, things you never knew you could see with your eyes.
When you met again, nothing had changed. You hadn’t realized that you had only just begun to see the world’s potential beauty. As she lied back in the grass and told you about her life with lips that looked like love, the world shifted again and the trees around you began to resonate with something that would best be compared to life itself. It was calming and soothing, and as natural as the words that spilled from her lips, and contrasted against them in a way that made them look violent in comparison. The grass looked vivid and harsh as it framed her long tresses of hair that splayed across it in the most brilliant pure way.
The contrast made her look even more beautiful, in your opinion, something you hadn’t thought possible.
When you glanced into the sky you noticed that it was smudged with cool serenity that didn’t quite look like the nature surrounding you, but was closer to it than the passion of the woman lying in the grass.
As the sun began to set, undiluted shallow serenity became deep and fathomless, and it filled to the brim with images composed of white starlight.
It didn’t take long for you to understand that colors aren’t just vision. Colors are what the world is assembled from. They are feelings and emotions, thoughts and actions.
When she whispers into your ear with words of romance and sweet nothings that don’t mean nothing, all you feel is red, and when you kiss her red is the color of her breath. When you ask her to marry you her cheeks are red and when she recites her vows, her eyes are red too.
From then on life was a whirl of vibrant colors. Colors you couldn’t even hope to identify flew past your eyes at unimaginable speeds, but you didn’t care because she was there, and she was seeing them too.
Or at least you thought so.
When you came home to find someone else in your place, red across their face, you grew red too, but not like before. Red because the sweet nothings really did mean nothing, but you were also blue, because the vows had meant nothing too. You were red to know that you could see so much color for someone who never once saw color for you.
Yes, when she leaves you’re red, but when she’s gone you’re blue. For some reason, colors no longer appealed to you, not anymore. The woman who brought you color began to take them away, and truth be told you didn’t really want them anymore anyway. Trees stopped looking gentle, the sky stopped looking pure, starlight wasn’t white, and even flowers lost their hope. They wilted away with the colors that seeped out of your vision without the least bit of haste.
The last color you see is the faded passion of the roses that have long since died in the vase on your coffee table, which stood waterless and barren, the petals cracked and crumbling. You throw them away in the end, deciding that they’re useless now, but resolving that maybe one day, just maybe, you’ll see color again.
