Deuteranopia

Deuteranopia: notes on seeing each other

We are in the park, it is four o’clock, on one side the sky is dark but on the other reds are finding their way to disappearing.

You asked

my favourite colour is green like the mint growing on top the Grangethorpe Road bus stop.

I know it is mint because I have spent summers sprig searching for roast dinners friendless in spring, rubbing leaves between fingers until oil stained the air.

You tell me you love me. Birds sing, but in my memory it is quiet.

I am sitting in faux leather chair telling her, no I can’t see the number in the splodges of colour. She says that means I can’t see the colour of the splodges. Go figure. Deuteranopia: lacking the cones for a medium wavelength. Missing something.

I am asking you to never give me red roses again. It’s not that I dislike the flower. I just miss the petals for the leaves. The red for the green. Colour-blindness makes quiet out of memories. Like old movies.

If you look at pictures of child me, try to remember I didn’t know that’s what I looked like. I still don’t. Each colour scheme seems normal. But I know now it isn’t.

I would like to have known sooner that I am different.

You might ask me once again to explain how I can savour a colour I cannot see. Maybe I will respond:

Flared trousers, cactus spines, the song Help me Rhonda, the OpEds section of the New Yorker, new grass under shepherds’ feet, mint condition Bead Blast Barbie, charity shop cardigan, champagne drunk from cider cans, aloe infused shampoo, the seaweed that has bubbles in, iridescent duck feathers, sister’s fingers, missing links, church bell ringers, the years I couldn’t talk to waiters. Don’t tell me what I can’t see. Green is the Strange Quark.

You give me roses and make me to fantasize a colour scheme. But give me pretty stones like a magpie and I will remember the dull knocking of rock against love, like a heartbeat.