He Wouldn't Take Off His Sunglasses -- Crystal Kadakia

There's something I call true color out there and something I call man-created color. Animals perceive color (sometimes), humans perceive color (but not the full spectrum) - alas, all these exceptions to the rules of true reality. It changes how we see the world, it changes how we perceive everything.

He wouldn't take off his sunglasses, not him, not ever. Not when he was at graduation, out in the glaring sun of Texas. The kind of sun that makes the air shimmer and you wonder if your skin, too, will burn and steam like the mirages.

He wouldn't take his sunglasses off, not on his first day of work. Or out on his motorcycle. Or on a first date.

Not even when his Mom died.

This life is about perception. About what you want to perceive. And him? He wanted to perceive nothing but the darkness. He wanted to run, but the closest he ever got was the tinted shades and a gaze that looked right past you.

"Take them off, goddamnit. It's evening, the sun is down," she said. He didn't respond, but stared behind her.

"It could almost be a canoe, couldn't it? A dugout canoe with a lid," he thought. "Absurd, idiotic thoughts. These are the kinds of thoughts idiots have when someone dies." he shook his head at his own ridiculous behavior.

"Um, is that a no?" she prodded, annoyed beyond belief. "This is it, Brent. This is your last chance to see her. And this is what you're going to do? Hide behind your stupid shades?" she threw her hands up, frustrated.

Everything looked an orange brown behind these. Nothing seemed real - her skin didn't seem real, the trees looked like a Dr. Seuss comic. His hand lifted to his glasses. Itched at him. His brain begged him to just this once, stop running. Follow logic, follow courage. It didn't make any sense to leave those shades on.

Reluctantly he let the logic overcome. His fingers gripped the frame and before his heart could stop him, he flung his shades to the ground. Now he could see the purple hues of dusk, the gray clouds amassed above. The trees weren't shadows, they were real. True color.

His Mom was in true color, too. "True dead color," he thought. He wanted to run: fight or flight, always the choice. "Time to fight?" he asked himself. "Is this why you're dead? To convince me that reality doesn't suck if I just opened my eyes? That it is worth seeing, being in?"

He thought about the countless hours of his life. Hours and hours, spent hiding. Hiding behind chromatic television shows, video games, "protecting" himself from the light when he went outside. His mom loved to walk, so there he would be, by her side. She would point out that flower or this bird.

Now he doesn't know if he really ever saw them.
"We were all always just trying to look so damn cool," he thought, ironically. "But we never connected, just afraid of being real, putting ourselves out there."

Up came his foot. With a crunch, the black shine of Gucci shattered into the blades of grass. She looked shocked as he laughed. He felt free.

It was a weird sensation - like freeing one sense to its full potential made all of his other senses more aware. He could feel the air on his face, cool and clean. He saw Holly's smile, the blue green of her eyes. He saw his mom, lying still, the light behind her skin gone. Flat color, serving as nothing but a reminder of the vitality she once had.

He felt tears but he didn't care. His perceptions used to be so clouded, his heart and mind out of sync. Always worried about judgements, about shoulds. How he should look, what he should say. Now he just wanted to experience life. It wasn't just the shades that he let alter the color of his life. It was other people's thoughts, other people's confusions, confusions of their reality.

This then, was the reality. His mother was dead. But it was okay. It was going to be okay. Because he felt like he had been born again. And maybe it was she who had felt sorrow for him, for the dead way he had been living life, so disinterested.

He turned, his face wet with slow tears. "I know what I want on her gravestone. 'Life is meant to be lived. Here lies the greatest example of life, even in her death" Holly's clasped hands shook, but to no use. Her eyes started releasing a small rainstorm of its own.

"That is perfect." she smiled.

True color finds us in life, one way or another. You don't know what experience will unlock it for you, at what age it will come, or who will bring it to you. The desire to truly experience life, to remove the biased lens you've been seeing through, is inevitable. To know oneself is to admit and accept the truth: the untinted, untainted truth. To appreciate oneself and the world in which one lives, is a great joy.