Red: 12
The disease I was infected with at three took me away from the colors of a rainbow. A palm draped over my visions, or, more specifically, the encephalitis infections led to inflammation of the brain, hence a permanent loss of color perception. Little did I mind, for I do not and could not reminisce myself living amongst colors anyway. You tell me I live merely in shades of gray, in monochromacy, on a land of aridity, where photosynthesis will not occur on a plantation and where laughter will not come out of a person's rolling tongue. Mama, I then will assure you, just as I have been doing all of my life every few months when your worries and empathy pour on me like a river bursting its banks. I’m fine without colors, it's not like I’ll become an artist like you.
You teach me colors as if teaching me a native tongue the family owns, I, being the only hope for its descent; I learn the colors as if learning a language I’ll never use. Red, you would say, pointing at the flames crackling on the fireplace in the living room, fire is red. Red is passion, is energy, is love, is romance, is ambition, and is fierceness. Oh, Mama, you are such a poet. Did you know that one can never imagine something they’ve never seen? I only nod, and stare at how the shades of gray on her lipsticked-lips matched her ruby nails, matched her sanguine cheeks warm from her zealous speech (all descriptions of colors I’ve learnt to accumulate over the years), and I say: Mama, you must then be red.
Orange: 18
Orange is in the fall, when days bleed into one another, and when memories slip through crevices of the mind. Summer ended hastily in our town, and half a month before college the earth of Dover was piled with crunchy leaves of autumn. You take me out on a walk after dinner amidst the canopy of maple trees, and you exclaim once again why I cannot hear the rolling heartbeat of late August. I retorted that I am not deaf.
You describe more of the color to me, but I maintained my silence— I want to tell you that I can now see orange.
Orange is your wrinkled forehead as you fret my future, is your outstretched hand and rice-scented palms, is the setting sun of dawn as we stroll across the neighborhood, is your bending back and fingers too sour to hold a paint brush. Orange is your ebbed sanguineness. Orange is the season of flux. But I only tell you that orange is in the fall, the summer before I went to college; the summer you start to decompose.
Yellow: 20
Lucie’s embrace—one that accompanied candescence— came with the strumming of nylon strings on the Flamenco guitar, the candidness of her mandarin intonation as she conversed in English, and the saccharinity of Dunkin’s lemonade refreshers she fed me with her burning lips. Two years into college, and two years away from Dover, I fell in love with the girl who sat next to me in history and who majored in music with a concentration in songwriting. She said she was a wisp of yellow, and I told her I cannot see colors, so she blinded my eyes with her hands and whispered into my ears that at least I can hear them. Her citrus-scented breath and sunshine kisses constructed my yellow.
Somewhere in between the late night facetimes within tight strings of job interviews and coffee chats and homework assignments, I listen to your coughs and observe your sagging, gray face. Lucie, I yell at you when you condemn me for my romance, is the vibrance you had lost? But, somewhere, when Lucie and I stray the streets like lost puppies after getting drunk, I still search for your figure under streetlights, as if your apparition sources any metallic warmth. Sometimes, when I have lost all pieces of sobriety, I hug every streetlamp I see.
Yellow, I then came to realize, is brightness that comes in different shades.
Green: 24
You decided to give New York a visit after I was settled, underwent a promotion, and bought a house in Riverdale. It was the first time you ever stepped out of Dover, the town that seemed to trap you for life. You were just in time for Lucie’s choral performance showcase, and before we stepped into the auditorium we stood in March air, where you commented that New York had less green than Dover. Your voice wobbled so thin I could not tell where your words began and where they ended. You were a tree hollowed, ring after ring, until you were but a brittle frame with creaking joints and trembling roots. Green is not for me now— you pull the collar of my leather jacket straight— it is for you, little sprout.
But green is in you, too. It is nurtured by the veins and flesh you think have decayed. You once told me that green is the promise of a new life and new future, but green is burgeoning from you too; you are the breath of earth subsequent to winter, you are the seeds that stem from dark soil. Mama, you are never decaying, you are growing, and God has given you rebirth.
Somewhere between Lucie’s voice as she melodies her songs, you joke that I have escaped one artist to marry another. Colorblind as the son of a painter, I will soon be tuneless as the husband of a singer. I reply that even if I lose both senses, I will still feel with my touch and ponder with my mind. You laugh at how childish my poetic-ness is.
Blue: 30
Three years after your passing, on a Saturday evening when the blue hour stretched its long, quiet fingers over Lake Ontario, Lucie decided to tell me of blue in the dimming light. Blue — she takes a sip of water— is the color of silence. Its, the stillness between two notes, the pause between heartbeats, the space before everything rises after its rest.
But, when I hear her speak of blue, I think of you.
I think of nights in Dover where everyone else has gone to sleep and your solemn figure remains by the dinner table, bathed in the paleness of the moon. Blue is the space between her words, the distance in her sighs, and the moments of peace when the world was asleep and we were together.
Blue was, instead with me all along. I carry the color, just as I carry red in your blushing cheeks and orange in the slips of seasons and yellow in the warmth of streetlamps and green in the veins of life. I am colorblind as the son of an artist, but Mama, you have given me color, and I have never been barren. I have always seen what I have never seen, and it is precisely colors that make up my life.
Mama, I have continued your legacy:
I am an artist myself.