Colorblind

I. World’s End

You.

Me.

Sitting together in the bed of your dad’s rusty Ford pickup, ages ago. The dust kicked up all around us as we licked orange sherbet push-pops. You sat on the raised hump of the tire and boasted no hands, but I was too afraid.

We were riding out to where the world ended, past measured rows of apple trees and tangled evergreens until the land stopped, dropping down into the sea.

You’d brought along a green balloon and you blew it up while I looked away. When I turned back, you stared cross-eyed back at me through it, the translucent green mask distorting your features into a green-tinged demon grin.

“You’re silly,” I said, giggling, looking away.

“Silly?” you responded, crossing your eyes and grinning at me wickedly, like we shared some secret. “I am not. Don’t you get it?”

I shook my head, still giggling. “Silly.”

You only laughed, pressing your nose deeper into the latex. “The world is green, you fools!”

II. Veins of Color

As the years have passed, I have sunk into a perpetual cycle of habits. Dinner at six o’clock, newspaper at seven, shower at eight, shampoo every day but conditioner only on the odd ones.

Maybe that explains why I am here. It’s September again. “Meet me where the world ends,” you said, that ever present smile playing on your lips, like there was some joke just beyond my understanding that never failed to make you laugh. So I came here to stand on the edge of the world. I came, answering the tug of the string that stretches between us and hating you for it. I have always been afraid that if I cut it from me, I will somehow cut myself.

It is colder than when we were younger. I’m wearing the striped scarf I knitted for you ten Christmases ago that you wouldn’t wear because of the purple. I should have known to make it green.

Below me, the world drops off into whites and blues and greens, into an ocean that extends endlessly without a sign of you. Guess time isn’t as powerful as I sometimes fear it is. Guess that even now, I’m too small to matter.

You always said that the edge of the ocean was the edge of reality. That what we saw out there wasn’t really our world anymore, but something bigger that we were too insignificant to comprehend. How wild, you said, and unpredictable the ocean was, like an untamed beast you longed to befriend, or at least understand.

I never understood. People can predict the changing of the tides. They post schedules along beaches that let the whole world know the ocean’s plans ahead of time. Now, they even have maps of the ocean floor made from bouncing sound around. The terrain may look alien, but they can explain it. Even the mighty tsunami is only the child of the earthquake.

I’ve read all about magnetic fields and tectonic plates and a great collision that raises mountains far below the surface of the water where we can’t see them. I’ve posted copies of tide schedules all along my walls.

So forgive me if I do not see as you see. The string may still be entwined around my vital organs and fused with my spinal chord, but I can still see that this is in no way the end of the world, only a slightly different extension of it. And when I look out before me, the years have changed nothing, and it is still the same old sea.

Or is it greener? Does your spell still enfold me so that I see green when there is really blue, or red, or orange? Loving you was never like a coat I could just shrug off. You tattooed yourself to my skin, and even though it has stretched with time, the colors won’t go away.

III. Riptide

One August night, when I was sixteen, we slept together beneath a storm. The sky a wet, gray blanket hung above our heads as we danced beneath it, in and out of the waves. An infinite beach, us singing Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” odd sharp rays of sun through the clouds that you said represented cartoon God.

When it rained, we turned our faces to swallow the droplets of water. You did cartwheels and I did somersaults, because I could never get my legs high enough.

Our strength died with the sun, and we collapsed on the sand. “We should go home,” I said, wishing I could stay forever lying on the beach next to you.

You smiled your wicked smile and said, “Why? Why don’t we just stay here?”

“Here?” I said. The rain still fell and I shivered as the water ran down my face and arms. “You’re crazy. We’d probably catch pneumonia or something and die.”

You led me to a cave hollowed out of black rock, spider-webbed everywhere with a thousand white-rimmed cracks, and I traced them with my eyes while I lay by your side, secretly imagining us making love and turning away so you couldn’t see it in my eyes.

When you rolled me over to face you, I looked away, afraid you could read my mind. You pulled me into your arms. “You’re shivering.”

I did not tell you it was not because of the cold. You tilted my chin upward, and the a faint beam of moonlight ghoulishly distorted your smile.

“Marry me,” you whispered.

I giggled, glad for the darkness.

“I’m serious! You, me, a little house…”

“A little houseboat,” I said, drawing away.

“A little houseboat,” you agreed, laughing. “C’mon, say yes.”

“Okay,” I murmured, rolling away from you in the cold white sand, biting my lip to keep from grinning. “Yes, I mean. Yes.”

But while I grew to long for more than those simple games, you never did. I wanted you to become a cliché for me. I wanted you to ride up through the green surf on a white stallion, rearing up as you reached me. I wanted to lay my head in the small of your back and ride with you forever through the foam of your beloved sea.

But marriage, and even love, was like the ocean to you; something huge and foreign that might intrigue you, but that you would never understand. Funny that the things I acquainted myself with were oceans away from you. Funny that I could comprehend the love, I could read scientific explanations of the sea, but there were always parts of you far too deep for me to probe.

A part of me always understood that, even though I loved you so much I would have willingly followed you into the sea. Even though I loved you so much you could’ve chained me to the rocks, and I’d still have sung as the water filled my mouth and my lungs. Loving you was like being caught in a riptide, and gladly I relinquished myself to your pull. I could have saved myself by swimming parallel to the shore, but it was far easier to surrender.

IV. Because and Why

Why do I hate you?

Because while you were the giant tree that reached up from the headlands, I was only the adoring flower that grew in your shadow. Because I loved you a thousand times stronger than myself, and it still wasn’t enough. Because flowers cannot survive chocked by roots and suffocated by shade. Because even when you had grown away from me, I could never transplant myself from your soil.

And because I was right, and the ocean is greener than it has ever been.

And why do I love you?

Isn’t it obvious?

Because.

V. Silence

I always thought that loud silence was just a stupid oxymoron. That was before I listened to it, the roar that presses down on my ears, hard, painful, louder even than the ocean.

But you must have feared it too. “I’m really busy,” you would say. And in the habit of paraphrasing yourself to cover up the sound of my own rejected silence, “I have a lot to do.”

But if I ever confronted you, you would have laughed. You would have said that silence is just another sense’s word for nothing.

If silence had a color, it would be green.

There must be seaweed down in the water today, because even the foam is green. I think it must be cloudy because the sky is casting a green tint all over the sand.

I told you once, I’d read that deep in the ocean, the tectonic plates are colliding and raising a giant mountain range miles beneath the deceptively calm surface. What I didn’t say was that as Isaac Newton taught, for every action there is a reaction. Every time you spoke or smiled or moved, something beneath my calm surface collided.

What I didn’t say was that while the tectonic plates push together to form those mountains beneath the sea, somewhere else the earth is pulling apart, leaving a rift that only grows deeper with time.