I Dream In Colors

We all saw in black and white. 

I lived in an apartment building that appeared no different than the one next to it, or the one next to that. The mornings, on a good day, were simply white. The nights were always saturated in black. 

Everyone was accustomed to our bicolored reality because that’s all we’d ever known, but it wasn’t established with the same certainty across all people. My parents used to see in color, but my grandparents did not. Perception alternated with lineage, one generation inherited color, the next did not. 

The knowledge had been passed down to me the same way folklore stories commonly are. Red, yellow, blue, and everything in between. Though, the lesson didn’t end there. Every color was linked to an emotion, a visual cable used to jumpstart the spectrum. 

I was apparently born in the wrong generation, but I dreamed in it anyway. 

Red was warm and lustful. Blue was somber and inexplicably frightening. Green was appalling, like a fungus embedded behind my corneas. Yellow was lethargic, no movement in my limbs even when my brain was shooting an overload of commands to them. Orange was just bizarre. Grey was catatonic and I was devastated because that was the closest resembling color of my reality. 

My mother once told me, “You’ll know blue when you see it.”

One night I shot up from a dream. 

The clock read 3:17. 

My vision was blurred until I rapidly blinked it back. I always slept with a nightlight on, if only to dilate the opacity of the darkness, but when my eyes cleared all I saw was blue. Different hues of it, ones almost as inky as the night and others lighter like my skin on a crispy winter morning. I shut my eyes with steel force, afraid and almost entirely convinced this was still a dream. I counted to ten and reopened them. Sure enough, everything was still as it was ten seconds ago and my mother had been right. 

My feet carried me to my bathroom, hopeful that splashing some cold water on my face would help. The green that blinded me as soon as the overhead light came on felt like a fatal avalanche. My head began spinning so hard, I almost dove nose-first into the sink. I gulped down vomit and rid my forehead of the sweat beads that had started forming there with the back of my hand. 

It dawned on me then that I had called the bedroom blue because I had been told blue was somber, and because the moment I saw it something shriveled with fear inside me. I had called the bathroom green because it’s always been described as sickly, and I almost left my stomach on the tiles. The tiles were a variation of that color after all, my father had told me so when I moved in. 

But neither of those things proved anything. For all I knew, I could have gotten them backwards. 

The thought occurred to me and stayed while my hand was still clamped around the porcelain like it was the only thing tethering me to earth. 

It was a ridiculous concern and embarrassingly obvious, the fact that we didn’t discuss this all the time. We just passed the knowledge around like chewed-up food, easier for us to swallow.  

Then another thought: my mother always said the kettle was red. 

Be careful, the red kettle is hot. 

I ran to the kitchen where the digital clock told me an hour had passed.  

4:13. 

I rummaged through the cabinets until I dug out the kettle I had taken with me when I moved out of my childhood home. Nothing about the color in front of me was warm. It wasn’t lustful or violent or particularly alive at all. My stomach sank, though, for an entirely different reason. 

The kettle was blue. 

Or at least, if every description my mother had ever given me was anything to go by, it was.

Turning it over my hands, I thought about the amount of times my mother had identified that kettle as the red one. How my father had corroborated this by referring to it in the same manner. Two people calling the same thing by the same name should have been enough. It had been enough for twenty-seven years. 

Around 4:45 I decided to call her, bracing myself for the lecture I was going to hear for giving her such a scare in the middle of the night. The alternative was losing my mind, so the choice really made itself. 

“Everything’s fine,” I said as soon as she answered with a breathless panic. 

That was technically not true, but nobody was dead, which was what she would have been expecting. 

I asked her what color the kettle was, and the pause that followed was long and quiet enough for me to hear my father stirring beside her on the bed. 

“What?”

“The kettle you gave me when I moved in.”

“It’s five in the morning, are you losing your mind?” 

Yes. 

“No. But please answer me.”

She sighed then. “Blue.”

I looked down at it.

“You always said it was red.”

“No, I didn’t.”

It came out with no hesitation whatsoever. There was no confusion, no time spent recalling something that had apparently been as obvious as her own name.

For a moment I convinced myself I was wrong. That was an old reflex, the way my mind rearranged itself obediently around my parents and the certainty with which they said something. I searched my memory for another kettle, another sentence I might have confused. 

“Dad called it red too.”

“Your father calls everything the wrong thing.”

Behind her, my father objected but she silenced him. 

I sat down on the kitchen floor, splintered with defeat. 

“What does blue look like?” I asked her. 

“We’ve been over this a hundred times.”

“I know. Tell me again.” 

She sighed, louder this time, but indulged me anyway. Blue was the sea outside the house we rented one summer when I was ten. Blue was the sky clear of clouds, and the veins beneath the paper-thin skin of my wrists. Blue was the color of my favorite coat when I was a kid. 

She spoke without once telling me what blue actually looked like. 

“And red?”

“Warm.”

“That’s not a visible thing.”

“Red is red. How do you expect me to explain it?”

I didn’t know. 

“Are you all right?” my mother asked.

I told her I was.

I still hadn’t told her I could see.

The confession had been sitting at the tip of my tongue since I dialed her number, but the longer she spoke, the less I wanted to give it to her. She would only question what I could see and correct me when I got it wrong. She would give me red and blue and green all over again, and by morning I would know the world exactly as she had known it.

“Go back to sleep,” she said. 

“I will.”

“And the kettle—you were right. It’s red.”