Color Vision

When I see a person, I see their colors.

Beyond the simplicity of ebony and ivory skin or Citrine eyes or pecan brittle freckles.

Beyond black bear shades of wavy hair.

I get lost in the hues and descriptors and the artistry of each bodily palette.

Beyond this artistry, I see the bubble of color that rests in the space we call aura.

I see colors that haven’t been named; colors that retinas and pupils aren’t designed to perceive.

And the colors are beautifully unusual.

Not in the way that a psychedelic trip exposes the mind to a chaos of color and bleeding movement, I see the body as solid and the aura as comprehensible madness. The body is flame and the heat is aura. I can see heat.

deep blue, softened by electric shocks and whale calls

baby pink, sliced and shredded by titanium

citrus orange in a blood bond with a whisper of purple

white that transitions through the rainbow in milliseconds

sunrise gray, shoved into a burgundy velvet drawstring bag

The colors are living and active, as are the humans from which they radiate.

Color stories that each body wrote for me.

They radiate radiant. And I don’t even have to look directly to feel a body’s colors. It’s perceivable electricity, sent directly to the theater in my mind. It’s the vitality of breathing and thinking and existing and emitting a field of presence and swirling motion that’s more unique than a stagnant thumb print.

I can see your energy.

I can feel your signature.

And it’s a great torment to me that I cannot photograph or paint or recreate these colors.

They live in my mind and they live in the closest words I can find to create them.

And I imagine what it’s like to be blind. And I imagine what it’s like to be blind to auras.