But listen to the color of your dreams It is not living It is not living

Sometimes she saw green. She would just wake up and everything would look as if viewed through emerald glasses. The pearls in her grandmothers folded wrinkly ears, the sky through her old french glass windowpane, it was all tinted with green.


And then the next day, she would see it all in red. Red trees, red teeth, red cars.


Then blue. Or purple. And so on. She loved it. Loved never knowing what she would see when she woke up, loved how everything that looked one way one day looked completely different the next.


But she could never see what she had seen again, because if she ever took a picture, it was of the colors that everyone else saw, normal people, not the color she saw it in, so the next day she would see the image in another color. She could never preserve these moments of beauty affected so profoundly by the colors.  It was like there was a screen, a translucent tinted slide, that conformed perfectly to her irises, to her unique pupils. And each tinted slide was replaced as she closed her eyes to sleep, to wake up and see a bright new day, a bright new color.


She missed so many of those days, missed with such a longing, like the day she saw in mango orange, rays of sunlight of creamy sorbet, or the day everything was different shades of night blue. It was like night vision, everyone leaping shadow dancers. But even without the chance to ever revisit these days but in her memories, the girl lived with it. She knew she was lucky enough to even experience them once. 


She was a painter, and everyone would marvel at her work because she would paint the most mundane, everyday things, and transform them into, well, art. The girl felt this was the closest she would ever get to having the world through her eyes, so she worked hard. She worked with a passion, the thinnest point of a pencil carving the most precision and life onto a canvas she would be glimpsing in sepia tea color, then salmon pink. What people liked so much about her works as that she might paint one scene ten times, yet each piece was so uniquely different, you could hardly tell they were all the exact same view, the exact same snippet of a life. That was because each one was painted in shades of just one color, just as the girl saw it.


She, of course, couldn't tell the colors she painted apart from the other. They were all just different hues of the same color. So instead, she would have an assistant (mostly it was her high school teacher who would help out) and she would say to him or her when she began painting "Today is turquoise. Bring me some turquoise." And he or she would bring her a palette with turquoise paint, which she would mix to different shades for for the "different" colors of the painting, judging by their shadows, their lightness and darkness. 


People loved her technique and unique style and how much feeling was put into each piece, and the girl loved how happy the paintings made people. And so it went on like this, a painting a day, never the same color. 


Until one day. The two colors she never saw in where black or white, the absence and totality of color. But this day, she woke up and everything was in black-and-white, an old photograph. Amazed, the girl looked in the mirror, devoid of color for the first time in her life. Shades of gray, it was all shades of gray, dusty, creamy, sharp, softened. She ran around the house and outside in a frenzy, looking at everything in stunned rapture.


Then, She took out her tubes of paint, to see them colorless as well. But when she took off the tops, thick, saturated, explosive color slipped out. The tube marked yellow was the creamiest yellow; the tube marked red was the most violent red. The vibrance of each color shocked the girl. She reeled back, experiencing the fact that she could see all the colors--at the same time! Overjoyed, she ran to the mirror, chose the colors she thought herself to be, and painted herself colorful over her black-and-white reflection. She leapt off, leaving the portrait of a colorful young woman painted to the mirror, smiling the widest smile possible.


She ran outside and noticed her feet, nestled in the grass of her front yard. She plucked one piece, felt its soft slenderness. She weighed it in her palm; weren't books always mentioning how green the grass was? The girl uncapped the green, vert and squeezed some of it on her palm. Laughing, she pressed it against the grass. Grabbing a handful of speckled green grass, she gathered it into a brush and painted the grass around her the most lush, verdant green she had ever seen in. Then she painted the waiting school bus a daffodil yellow. Then instead of getting on the school bus, she blissfully lay on the ground, surrounded by a black-and-white world. She reached up and brushed the sky blue, and dreamily began to paint upon it a rainbow, using every color she had ever seen in.




Title Quote: The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows