Negotiations with Colour

She still felt uncomfortable wearing colours. People probably didn’t pay so much attention to her clothes, but in her mind that was the first impression someone would get when they met her. A first impression of what she had been through, how she faces life, of who she is. What if she wore something bright and someone who saw her thought she was happy? Or that she hadn’t gone through a sufficient amount of suffering? What if she bumped into an old friend at the supermarket and they assumed she was soft or naive? 

We can’t blame her for having these obsessive and possibly nonsensical thoughts. She grew up in a country where many women only wore black. She wasn’t sure why. Did they need to uphold the country’s collective bereavement? Or was it common punishment in countries reaching 45 degrees celsius for women to wear black? Martyrdom and suffering were held in high regard; that much was clear from the historical and religious stories they were taught in school. Also from the books on the lives of saints and their torturous deaths, which she perused with abnormal interest when she was in primary school.

Well in her case, it was time, after twenty years of wearing black, to accept that it had to go. At school she was told her skin looked yellow, or that she had the complexion of a dead person. Even her mum often pointed out with disappointment, “Don’t you have other clothes? Isn’t it time to start dressing like a grown up?”. The irony did not escape her, considering her mum had an RGB hue calculator in her brain that made sure she herself would never venture far from the dark greys.

But let us look at the first day she wore black. It couldn’t be any other way, since it was on that day that all colour faded from the world, starting from her heart. Only that morning, she was playing with her cousins, careless and free, at the most magical beach she had ever been to. The sun was caressing her face, the turquoise waters were shimmering and she discovered she could sink her feet in the soft, golden sand and pick up starfish and big orange seashells with her toes. As she marveled at the abundance of this beach, she heard her dad’s voice calling her from the restaurant at the shore. He had gotten a phone call from home. She gathered all the seashells she could and made a little pouch for them with her t-shirt. 

A few hours later, they were booking a return flight at the airport. She understood that things must have been serious, but she was a bit annoyed with her dad for lying to the employee, saying that someone had died so that they could get an earlier flight. In the plane, she asked him if there was any hope. He thought for a while and said, “No”. But she didn’t believe him. Nothing would make sense if she did. So she just stayed quiet and waited.

Her uncles came to pick them up when they landed, and she sat at the back with her dad. They cruised through the highway, the car breaking up the tiny droplets that made up that humid July night. She rested her head on the window and let it cool her face. No one talked, and she kept watching the streetlights passing by in the dark. Until her uncle’s voice broke the silence. 

“The funeral is tomorrow at three.”

The floor of the car dissolved beneath her, the asphalt cracked and opened into a chasm, and she was sucked into a void. She floated in the dark for a moment or an infinity. Everything was suspended in mid-air, until in an instant, the chasm filled back in with blackness, tar gushing upwards, overflowing into her throat, and the earth spit back up her charred, raw body. The asphalt was sealed, the car floor closed up beneath her; and she kept watching the streetlights passing by in the dark. They were the only thing moving, blurry through her moist eyes, her throat solid and stiff. 

How could this new silence be so different from the silence from a few moments ago? How could the home they reached be so different from the one they left a few days ago? A palpable, grey emptiness drifted around it, pushing the front door open, marking the entrance into this shadow version of the world, after it was turned upside down. 

Inside stood the relatives, all dressed in black, like a gathering of lightning stricken trees in a desert. But before them, there was her mum, rushing to her, taking her in, engulfing her with a torrent of emotions. She and her dad must have been the only ones not wearing black, yet. In her life before, her mum was wearing black because her first husband had died. She wore it until she was married again and gave birth to her. But this time around there would be no reason to take them off again. As she hugged her, her mum mumbled something about him, her brother, being in the sky with his dad, where he would protect him. Hearing this, was she comforted or fooled? She didn’t have time to decide, as she slipped out of her mum’s arms and was passed around by the black trees, into a ceremonial dance of grief.

Some relatives would stay the night in her bedroom so she lay awake on the couch. She didn’t speak at all during those days, as if in silent reflection, trying to understand what was happening to the world. She was twelve.

The next morning, she asked what she should wear. It was a scorching day and she put on jeans and a black tshirt, the only black item of clothing she owned up until then. Everything had already turned black when they reached the church. Everything, except his white coffin. White for “young person inside”. She was alone. Alone as she watched them carry it inside, alone as she walked and stood over it, unable to stop staring at his bruised face and closed green eyes. Alone outside, waiting for someone to give her a ride to the cemetery. Alone, when her family threw soil in the grave, where the coffin lay open, while she refused to get him dirty. Alone, on the outskirts, because she was young, and couldn’t understand. She would remain alone, exuding darkness, anger or a complete lack of emotion for most of her youth. She never discussed the death with anyone, especially her family. Every year they would hold a memorial service, where everyone steered clear of talking about him. Not even his name was mentioned, except by the priest in the liturgy.

Twenty years later, it would finally hit her. She started having panic attacks while driving, terrified that the earth would open up beneath her and she would be sucked in again, that she would fall into oblivion, and that this time she wouldn’t be able to stop falling.

She had to start living again. She had to cut the strings that tugged at her heart every time she got a phone call, every time she heard the funeral church bells. She lived between two churches, so that was a tricky one. 

But most importantly, she had to stop wearing black. She could handle looking a bit pale while she was younger, but as she entered her thirties, black really didn’t do her any favours. So with a heavy heart or misguided hope, she gradually started wearing pale shades of yellow, green and brown. Now dressing with the colours of  a withering backyard, she still worried she would give people the wrong impression. She was shocked to find how hard it was to lean into the colours, to break away from the black and the darkness that she held so close for so many years. On that summer day twenty years ago, the sea lost its colour, the sun lost its light, the world was upended. If she kept the fear alive, if she kept everything dark, nothing could lose its colours again, she could stay in control. If she held death close, it wouldn’t be able to shock her again, she wouldn’t fall. But that meant that she was always suffering, always keeping her heart small and wrinkled so that nothing could hurt it again. And the darkness was part of her identity. It was the only point of connection of her suffering to the outside world, to other people. Otherwise she was only defined by herself, alone, with no one ever seeing her. And of course she felt guilty for being so preoccupied and emotional about her clothes and how she was perceived. She felt guilty for being the one that stayed alive, but not living.

But when your body has been barren and colourless for so long, at some point a tiny green leaf or flower will appear. The only thing you can do is to tend to it, to nurture it, until you heal. There’s never one specific thing that happens, no revelation or resolution to the story of grief. Just all the moments when you realise you are the only one responsible for your life, so you start wearing colourful clothes and trying to blossom.

So even though it often felt like she was going in circles, starting towards hope and arriving to despair, she persevered; and slowly, day by day, without even realising it, the trees started becoming greener, more vibrant. As if they had a direct line to her lungs, she started to breathe again. She started hearing the birds. She started remembering bits and pieces of her life with her brother. She started to realise she had never been alone. He was always there with her. But only by letting the world regain its colours, by nurturing herself back to life, could she notice that he had been there all along.