As I lurch down the path, everything is rust-red.
Red, and yellow-green and grey-brown, the color of dead and dying things. Dull, muted as the winter air crystalizes in my lungs and the grass shrivels to a crisp frozen stubble. The buildings around me are brown, made of chipped brick and copper.
Walk fast, I tell myself. Live fast. Die young. I have places to be and people to see. But the people flash past in a blur, black streaks of smoky shadow stretching across the path, this path that I follow like a robot polished to a silvery sheen. This path that is landscaped in the colors that the system wants me to see, that I’ve been programmed to see. Rust-red. Yellow-green. Grey-brown. My vision is not mine. Maybe that’s why it all seems lackluster.
What of the other colors?
The thought is pale yellow like a distant star, the shimmering pastel hue of hope and wonder. One of these days I should lift my head and notice them, really see them: the other colors. The colors that I have always been taught were meaningless, the colors that serve no one. White: the cotton ball clouds drifting through the atmosphere. Pink: the blazing sun if I stare too long. Blue: the sky, a fragile shade, like a freshly laid robin’s egg. White pink blue, all of them meaningless, pointless to think about. Why bother? The sky is for birds, who fly because their lives have no aim, whose brains are too small to comprehend the arbitrariness of it all. They don’t realize that the sky has nothing to offer them. Man knows better than to immerse himself in such emptiness. It is futile to dream, they tell me, to seek one’s destiny anywhere other than in what is given, what unfolds beneath me as I tread the red path.
Red: the color of willful ignorance.
Everything I’ve been told is wrong. If the sky is meaningless, then why is there a crayon my box that is the same precise shade of baby blue? There is substance, something to discover in it all. Why else would it exist?
Here is something else with substance: man. Man, who is brown and tan and ash-black and beige, who has created this world and unearthed the shades of it, this world that is an oyster, craggy and dark at first glance but rippled with opalescent iridescence inside. Man is a diamond revolving in the sun, shooting off beams of dazzling light, fractals of violet and magenta and crimson and gold and lime, and these—
—these colors often go unnoticed, because we have been trained to ignore them, trained that the only colors that matter are the colors of success. The system raises us colorblind.
But I am not. I am not a red path, or a patch of dead yellow grass and brick buildings. There is a whole other world surrounding me, a world of pink and white and blue and perhaps others, I can feel it. So I will go, valiantly, into the sky, into the futile yonder, where it waits. Or maybe there really is nothing to be found there, out in the world. It may be. But at least I will have, if I try…
…the other colors.
HUNTER LINAR 