A Vacant World in Colour

DISCLAIMER: introduces themes about death

A Vacant World In Colour

The air felt thick and still as I sat in the dimness. Purple is my favourite colour, even though I cannot see it. When he spoke, he explained purple as a soft velvet blanket that could tuck away the world. It is the colour of safety and the feeling of being loved. It is quiet and heavy, like a long held secret, but in a way that makes you feel protected from everything else. Like the slow resonant vibration of a cello, a low note that I feel in my chest where it echoes against my ribs rather than hearing it through my ears. Even though it looks like shades of grey, bleak and hollow, I can feel the cool comfort when I see it, the feeling I get from lavender crushing in a palm, amethysts hidden in the earth, and plums bruised and sweet.

The world was a charcoal sketch drawn by someone who had given up, and I was trapped in the smudge. To me, the sky was a sheet of unwashed tin, cold and unyielding, the ocean was gallons of melted lead, poisonous and slow, and bushes were lumps of grey snow, soot stained and dying. I had spent twenty years navigating a world of gradients and shades, never knowing or seeing the fire of a sunset, the desperate blaze of light, or the poison of a lime, a sharp biting sting.

Then there was Julian, his heartbeat the only rhythm I knew.

Julian did not just see colour; he bled it, he felt it like a wound that would not heal. He spent his afternoons, while his own strength ebbed away, trying to build a bridge between his eyes and mine. He would press his forehead against mine, clinging as if he might slip away, and whisper descriptions into the space between them, desperate to make me feel what she could not see, to make her feel the beauty of the world because I could not see.

"Purple is the best one, Clara," his voice breaking on the edge of a sigh, he would say, wrapping a heavy quilt that felt like a shroud around her shoulders. "It is a soft velvet blanket. It is the colour of safety and the feeling of being loved. It is quiet and heavy, but it makes you feel protected from everything else. Like the low note of a cello humming in your chest."

Purple then became my favourite colour, the feeling of a hero who is not loud or arrogant, but one who is modest, one who gives a sense of belonging to you especially when you need it most. And that was what Julian was to me. Switching the darkness in my life into a bright light even as his own light went out.

However on one rainy Tuesday as the sky wept onto the glass, it felt different. The purple was not the feeling of safety anymore, it was rustic and old like a dried up vein. The yellow was not a bright sun who was always cheery and positive, it was not that mellifluous bird song anymore, it was just grey. Just grey again, the colour of dust and bones. It was not beautiful anymore. I have had too many rains in my life, that this time the water officially washed away all hope, feeling, and colour. Those pulchritudinous azure eyes of Julian’s were not like a relaxing expanse of nothingness, a feeling of no responsibilities where I could just relax, it was grey. All grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, grey, pounding in my head, a frantic suffocating rhythm, as I saw it in my eyes, like a forever beating drum. Then I heard Julian’s voice, frail and trembling, and in that moment of distress, I did something that I forever regret.

Julian was trying to explain green using the scent of crushed grass dying in the summer heat, a feeling when breath is a struggle but I pushed him away, the rejection hanging heavy in the air.

"Stop it, Julian! Just stop!" I snapped, my voice echoing in our small grey apartment that felt more like a tomb as the walls were closing in. "You keep talking about velvet and cellos and fire, but to me, it is all just dust. You are describing a ghost to someone who has never seen a spirit. It is not romantic. It is lonely. Face it, I do not see colour, I never will. My life is just grey, no one and nothing can change that, I am just a block of grey with legs and arms who does not deserve anything except for grey, it is the truth, just the hard truth! You do not love me, all you feel is pity, you want applause from me because you have something so beautiful in the world that I do not."

"I do love you, that is why I am trying to give you the world Clara! The true world where you matter just as much as anyone, anything and any goddamn colour you can name." Julian shouted back, his face contortioning into a shade of grey I knew meant he was hurt, the colour of a bruised soul.

"You are giving me a fairytale I cannot visit!" I cried, tears tracking down my cheeks like liquid silver, freezing and bitter. "You look at me and see honey eyes, but I look in the mirror and see two holes in a mask. I do not want your descriptions anymore. I want the truth."

We didn’t speak for three days. Three days where both of us sat in a room of anger, disappointment, confusion, and greyness, a thick suffocating fog. The silence was so deafening, the darkest grey I had ever known.

A week later, Julian did not come home from his shift at the lab. Instead, a courier arrived with a small wooden box, splintered and cold, and a letter that wrote:

I found the truth, Clara. I am sorry I could not be the one to show you.

Inside the box were a pair of glasses with strange heavy lenses that felt like lead in my palms. Clumsily, my hands shaking with a terrifying realization, I slid them onto my face.

I gasped. I fell to my knees, the impact startling my spine as the world screamed. For the first time in my life, the flat grey sky cracked open into a bruising electric blue, so vivid it felt like an insult. The dull tan of the rug was suddenly a deep earthy brown, the colour of a fresh grave. It was sensory overload; it was violent and beautiful.

I looked down at the note, but the paper was stained. There was a splash of something on the corner: a deep jarring red. It was the colour of a heartbeat. It was the colour of an ending, the final bloody stain of his love.

I ran to the hospital, the world blurring into a kaleidoscope of terrifying brilliance, a circus of colours that did not care I was breaking. I burst into the room, my new eyes stinging from the vibrancy of the emergency lights, cold, clinical, and unforgiving.

Julian was there, but he was pale, a grey that even the glasses could not fix, the hollow grey of someone already gone. He had been sick for months, a silent rot he had hidden while he spent his final savings and energy working with a specialist to calibrate those lenses specifically for my eyes. He had traded his last moments of life to ensure I would not spend mine in the dark. He did this all for me and I had spent his final days in silence.

I grabbed his hand, so brittle it felt like it might shatter.

"Julian? I see it. I see the purple."

He looked at me, his eyes fluttering like a candle gasping for air. He could not see the colours anymore; his vision was fading into the final white, an empty terrifying nothingness.

"Is it like the cello?" he whispered, his voice a ghost, a faint thread of sound.

I looked at the amethyst grapes on the bedside table, glinting like mocking tears, then back at the man who had loved me into a new dimension. "No," I sobbed, the vivid green of his hospital gown mocking my grief, so bright it felt like a scream. "It is not like a cello. It is like you. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

Julian smiled, a small weary tilt of his lips, and then his hand went limp, releasing the world forever.

I stood in the hospital room, a world of million watt colour exploding all around me, a cruel brilliant fire, but the only person who could explain what any of it meant was gone. I was finally seeing the world in full bloom, but I was seeing it through a veil of tears that turned the whole beautiful technicolour world back into a blur.

Purple is my favourite colour, even now when I can see it, though it tastes like salt and sorrow. He explained purple as a soft velvet blanket. It is the colour of safety and the feeling of being loved. It is quiet and heavy, but in a way that makes you feel protected from everything else. Like the slow resonant vibration of a cello, a low note that I feel in my chest rather than hearing it through my ears. It does not look like shades of grey anymore, it looks like purple and reminds me of him, I can feel the cool comfort when I see it, the feeling I get from lavender, amethysts, and plums.