The leaves are losing their color, the afternoon light is dying, and suddenly I’m taken by the fear that all color will die with it. The world is drab, gray-blue and getting gray-bluer; as it does, every hue blends into a uniform non-color until it’s dark, so dark my eyes must rely on the rods, those cells that sense nothing but light or darkness, but never color, and I try to imagine the horrifying world that would be ours but colorless.
I sit looking at my hand as its illumination fades, willing it to hold onto its color. It won’t listen. I’m pacing. Thinking of morning, a morning all in gray, a coming morning of blacks and whites and nothing else. I might as well be blind. I can’t imagine it as anything but horrid, to have owned colors and lost them: like seeing for fifty years, then having someone rob you of your vision entirely. Except the blind don’t have to endure the taunting of colorless shapes, constantly reminding them of what they’ve lost. It must not happen, but it will, and I shake.
I think of bats, seeing with sonar. I imagine perhaps texture is to them as color is to us, an inseparable quality of each object, and I imagine there might be an anxious bat out there, and the bat and I share twin paranoias: as I fear the imminent loss of color, the bat fears the imminent extinction of texture, the smoothening of all surfaces. The bat need not fear, but I do.
It’s dark now. I sit staring at my hand through the night. I try to recall the colors of my defining memories. This exercise unsettles me: I can’t remember them. All color has been extinguished from my memories, just like all color will soon be banished from the external world. Who stole the colors of my memories? Could it be, terrifying but possible, could it be that the colors were never there to begin with?
As the night glides on towards morning, I wonder whether my fear of losing color isn’t just a handy substitute for the loss of something else. Something I can’t mourn because I can’t define it, a residual feeling of loss I can no more shake than I can connect to its source, because the source is undefined or unknown and unknowable to me. I’ve lost something, maybe, and my anxiety stems from this loss, but I don’t know what I’ve lost so I mourn what is right in front of me, easily accessible: color.
Night gives way to what my mother calls the night-morning, that time-slice too early to rise and too late to fall asleep, the non-time that belongs completely to neither night nor morning. If you ever find yourself awake at this hour, you’ll notice that its psychological character is one of undefined anticipation. We anticipate something, anything, but what? Immobile things gesture at movement, moving things seem suddenly as if still, shimmering. It’s like the second before jumping off a cliff, stretched out to an hour. I wait, and I find solace in the fact that for once I know what I’m waiting for: the end of the world.
Night-morning slides gently into early morning. Predawn light starts to work the sky, and I notice I’ve been freezing, sitting outside all night. I stare at the horizon and I choke for a moment. Phantom colors are dancing before me, but I shake them off. No, the early morning is exactly as monochrome as I’d expected. A faulty eye, a neural twitch, nothing more. The sun is climbing towards the heavens, I imagine, just behind that ridge, and soon the city will be bathed in colorless light. I shudder.
Then, suddenly, the sun bursts up from below the horizon. I’m blinded for a second, and then I see: the world. My hand. Faintly I see it, as if for the first time: color.
Sep 20, 2010