Colorblind

by DK Rule

He came with the violet crocuses, the air feathery with marigold pollen. I had low expectations for our first date, as I do with them all. I told him I was wearing jean shorts and a brown leather jacket so he could spot me, but I saw him before he saw me. 

He told me he was wearing a gray jacket, but it’s brown, almost mauve.

He was all gold wire-rimmed glasses and bad posture. We went to a concert at Brooklyn Monarch, a small punk venue with a dirty plastic backyard. We sat on the rotting retaining wall around the periphery of the outdoor space. My shoes squeaked on the chartreuse astroturf. I could feel the static white electricity from his polyester coat.

“What do you wanna do now?”

I thought that was it. Maybe it was his way of telling me he wanted to go back inside.

“I don’t know, what do you wanna do?”

His face went red and I could barely hear him when he said, “Well I want to kiss you.”

“I’d really like that.”

After missing the band I had gone there to see, we caught the last couple of songs of the following performer. I had never heard of them and, besides, I was too distracted trying to figure out how often I could look at him without being creepy. The bar had a varnish of sticky beer residue. The bathroom was covered in streaky black sharpie declarations and the stalls didn’t lock.

We sat on the bench outside as long as we could before he had to go let the stove repair man in at his apartment. We parted ways at Meadow and Waterbury. He texted me: “My face hurts from smiling so much” and I realized mine did too.

But time tends to reveal fissures in someone’s psyche.

I was in the turquoise-soaked Mediterranean all summer and he was in his room, stewing on past mistakes and mentally deteriorating, boxed in by eggshell walls.

In the south of France, I took an Arabic calligraphy class. The teacher wrote the boy’s name phonetically in script, at my request, in a deep magenta ink that bled around each curved edge. 

I gave it to him right before we stopped talking the second or third time. When we started talking again, he showed me the frame he bought for it, a periwinkle blue.

“I love that color.”

“Oh thank god, I was worried cause, you know.”

“Because you’re colorblind.”

“Right.”

I wonder what it’s like to see the world in grayscale. I can’t imagine. I see and feel it all in the extremes: blacks and whites and vivids. Gray is the in-between. Values oscillate from dark to light and back again. My optic nerve rejects that complexity. It’s easier, in some ways, to live on the outskirts, in starless blacks and blinding whites.

But gray can be a beautiful color.

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DK Rule is a writer and soon-to-be librarian living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She focuses on memoir and cultural commentary in her writing life. She is currently applying to grad school for Library Sciences alongside her many, many hobbies, including playing her guitar, oil painting, and knitting. Check out her Substack at https://substack.com/@dkrule

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