A Palette for the Living

At birth, there was amorphous static; a rumble as soft as the rain. I was held by the heel and blanched in whiteness, I was laid softly in a cradle of cold light; and then came the long blindness. A blindness without contours, a blindness without darkness, violent, and stark, and white-hot against my eyes: the haloed whiteness of fragile divinity of hospital sheets and icing sugar, of magnolias and mausoleums, of the mind before knowing and light before it scatters into infinite corrugations of colour.

Then came memory; the learning, the doing, the uncovering of languages histories, runes, tastes, and scents; here, everything was muddled. The whiteness sieved through a prism, and cracked open, kaleidoscopic. Suddenly there was the lilac bloom of wisteria, the deep golden glow of summer fruit , the crimson curdling of the sky at sunset, the liquid hazel of my grandmother’s eyes, the navy blue of a sequined night which hugged a world too big.

In childhood, I learned to see the ugly. The twisted mauve sinews of the Milky Way now looked much like the purple swell of a wound; I found that anger, like fire, can scathe the flesh and leave a coral mess of scars which are never quite skin; I found that blood is the colour of sharbat, yet it tastes more like the sea; I found that no matter how far you walk, the azure of the horizon is further still.

Later, I found my father swimming in the charred old oak of a whiskey barrel and one day he forgot to come up for air. Then came the blackness of death; the abyss grew within me like a tumour and swallowed the whiteness whole.

Slowly, womanhood has doused me in the blues; the blue at the far edges of the world where all light that enters is lost, scattered and flung, like sunshine skirting the turquoise belly of the Ocean. The frayed blue of worn-out denim, syrupy, in the humid ennui of dawn on a dusty weekday morning. The cyberpunk cyan of cold equations of electrons trapped in boxes and ordered columns of light; the velvety indigo of handwritten letters, from a home ten thousand miles away; the sapphire aura of mountains shaped by moonlight, in the heavy final steps to their summit, from where I can melt into the ancient glaciers and flow into the bottom of the sea.

Now, it is Sunday afternoon in the desert, the air weighed down with sweat. I have spent the morning trying to imagine what colours I have not yet learned to see; the bits of the spectrum buried in whiteness, fractals squirming in hidden hues . They say mantis shrimp can see so many colours they can even see cancer grow organs deep, the subtle inflexions of decay and death, are fringes on their rainbows.

Meanwhile, deep inland, a lonesome poet sordidly chisels through the blank calm of unscathed parchment with polygons of her suffering; I wonder what she will dig from the whiteness, and what colours will spill from her typeface tonight.