The Real Sunset is Never Lemon Scented

Grey can be beautiful. Beautiful in its monotony, in its consistence, in its dedication to being ardently bleak. Grey can be beautiful in its persistent capacity to be wholesomely ugly.

Some are lucky, some will see flecks of rose when their hand brushes against a cute girl on the bus, lilac in the twirl of a dancer who pirouettes in silent grace, saffron in the hum of cicadas that sing in damp summer heat, or midnight-blue in the flatline of a loved one.

Some are lucky enough to see intimacy, serenity, gaiety and desolation in the colours that beckon a life deviant of being utterly banal.

Grey can be beautiful, but when there is nothing else, nothing on earth is uglier than discovering just how many variations of grey one can truly have.

Such is colour-blindness.

I often feel a soft sadness in the corners of my heart for the redundancy of passersby exclaiming something to the effect of: “Wow! Look at that sunset!” as they pull out their phones to capture the beautiful colours the atmosphere had painted our sky with. The number of times I’ve stared at the sky alongside them, trying to comprehend just what was so miraculous about atmospheric pressure changes affecting the hues of the gasses our eyes are able to perceive, is, well, quite an embarrassingly high number considering I have yet to come to a definitive conclusion on the matter. Occasionally the sky would offer me a combination of shadow, graphite, iron, cloud, ash, fog, smoke and quotidian shades of grey that ensured me that despite my lack of ability to see it, the sky did in fact offer the rest of the population a minuscule level of spontaneity at the very least.

For the most part however, the sky was merely grey.

Or, 'blue'... whatever that means.

My father always used to say to me: “Sometimes the chair is just blue”. Which is apparently a rather common saying that I have merely become accustomed to attributing to him by proxy of thinking he was the smartest, most magnificent human being to ever walk the earth. He would say it to me whenever my curiosity about the world sent me into a tailspin of over analysis. He would tell me that some things in this world are not meant to be explained or analyzed, but simply enjoyed. Sometimes the writer of a great screenplay or novel did not have their protagonist sit in a blue chair to allude to their internal sadness, but rather, purely because the chair is just blue.

My mouth often tilts up in a sarcastic smile when I think about the cruelty of my father using a ‘blue’ chair in an analogy for his colourblind daughter. He was full of playful jabs like that; suddenly gasping and exclaiming my hair had suddenly turned pink only for me to laugh as I was unable to confirm his outrageous claim, or telling me the nail salon my mother took me to had painted my nails the same colour as poo, only for me to stick my tongue out at him and protest that the joke was on him! As I had specifically requested poo-coloured nails! His favourite game to play with me was one he called “Smell-o-vision”. Wherever he went on his vast travels he would buy every scented pen he ever came across so that upon his return home to me, we would sit on the balcony of our apartment and look at the sunset together with the box of scented pens and the little black notebook he loved so dearly. One by one, he would let me hold the pens up to my nose and tell him what colour I thought it was based on its smell, and I would designated where each smell belonged on the canvas of sky before us. And in his notebook, he would paint the sunset as per my exact direction. I distinctly recall my frequent use of a lemon scented 'Mr. Sketch' marker as being the sun, to which he would praise my genius at not only selecting the correct colour for the sun, but adding to it's celestial value by making it lemony-fresh. We collected dozens of these Smell-o-vision sky paintings over time. All were his ridiculous and wise attempts to both see the world through my colourblind eyes, and help me see the world through his full colour ones.

He was a perfect balance of wise and ridiculous, my father. Knowing so much of the world with no intentions of ever taking it seriously.

When he was diagnosed with stage-4 liver cancer and given mere months to live, it was his wisdom that kept him sound, while his ridiculousness kept him sane.

He knew that the 12-year-old girl sitting at the side of his deathbed, furiously assaulting his little black notebook with her revolutionary ideas in her utmost maturity, was waiting impatiently in patient silence for her Dad to be able to leave his hospital bed. He knew that this 12-year old speck of sun-kissed, dandelion scented curiosity, was wasting away the childhood that was meant to be filled with crucially important playground business, all in favour of waiting for something so far beyond her comprehension to happen.

He knew more than anything though, that with or without him, she would be going places. Places that would likely consume her in student debt, minimum wages jobs and despair at a system that punishes her intense call to learn everything about the world.

He was right, of course.

I could only laugh as I recalled the twelve years I had spent with my father and the past ten spent without, all leading to here.

My hands grip the simplistically complex safety deposit box that had been left for me to open 10 years after his death, on my 23rd birthday, and not a day sooner.

I felt as though I should be more nervous, or excited, perhaps even melancholy, as a moment a lifetime in the making was now before me. Whatever was in this box would be my sole inheritance from my father. Instead, nothing short of an intense calm washed over me as I gently opened the box; I knew whatever the inheritance inside was, it would undoubtably be my Father's trademark combination of wise and ridiculous that has never once failed to inspire me. A smile crept across my lips as I lifted the contents of the box closer to my defective eyes.

His black notebook.

I instantly recalled thousands of instances my Dad and I would share this notebook to materialize anything from sunsets to film ideas.

I flipped through the pages of the book one by one, to reveal countless drawings, poems, scribbles and schematics, accompanied by hundreds of smell-o-vision sketches of sunset skies we had created together.

The notebook still had a faint smell of assaultively pleasant marker smells...especially lemon from the dozens of lemon-scented sunsets we had drawn together.

The inside cover of the notebook read in his ornate handwriting:

To the little girl I knew so well, and the woman I was not fortunate enough to know,

Joke’s on this bank for thinking they were safe-guarding a stockpile of wealth from an aristocratic pilot when really it’s just a pile of drawings done by a colourblind kid, huh?

Just kidding, not about the colourblind kid part, but about the money. I have no doubt you picked a degree worthy of satiating your curiosity and it likely was not cheap. So I’ve left you everything I had saved for your college fund; it's not much but hopefully it will pay off some of the student loans you have...or at least pay for a lifetime supply of scented-markers!

Money is so lame though right? So as your main inheritance, go look at the sunset. You’ve waited long enough to see it. I still think all of our versions are way better though—the real sunset is never lemon scented!!

I love you kiddo, go out there and do all the things. Don't overthink it, just enjoy it.

Dad

My eyes welled up with tears, overwhelmed seeing my Dad’s voice dictated onto paper in tandem with the relief of my student loans being paid and the reassurance that even in death, my father refused to be anything less than exceptionally wise and completely ridiculous.

I hugged the little black notebook, stuffed with papers close to my chest as I sobbed. I sobbed desperately, openly, freely in the silent sanctuary of the safety deposit box room, knowing not a single box in the room could possibly be of more value than this one. Especially as when my eyes came to open despite the sticky glue of my own tears fusing them shut, I realized.

The notebook, the drawings, the scribbles and smell-o-vision skylines…they were all in full colour. I could see the apple-scented greens I had inadvertently chosen on the July 12th sunset we had drawn when I was 10, and the bubblegum-smelling pinks I had paired with grape-scented purple clouds for the December 20th sunset when I was 9. Dozens of skylines with their faded chemical smells were suddenly in full colour to me. I rifled through the drawings desperately searching for an answer as to how and why I could suddenly perceive colour for the very first time in my life.

My hands shook, my lip trembled, my breathing laboured…this was utterly unexplainable, utterly beyond comprehension, utterly beyond the capabilities of even my father’s ridiculous wisdom. I clawed my way through the pages, finally getting to the last page where a cheque for $20,000 in my name was neatly paper-clipped to a drawing of a blue chair, signed with a winking smiley face.

I of course, had never seen blue before up until this moment, but I had no doubts about the fact that the chair in front of me

was just

blue.

And that was the only answer, the only inheritance, I could ever need.