The Color of Light

There are the people. They may get cranky sometimes or cheat on the crossword. It can be frustrating driving behind them, cursing the traffic. They may pick their nose, lie about their age and take extra supplies from the office.

But also. There are people, the same people, who put on work boots or scrubs to proffer kindness to frightened strangers. Who get up early to write a grant, give blood by pints, help a neighbor or an unpopular cause. They put their change in that lonely box by the till, the one with the blurry picture of chip-toothed kids. They try. Earnestly: maybe as a reflex bleached of hope, maybe with a twinge of self-satisfaction (does the smug irritating pride erase the act?), or maybe as their only moment this week with a shade of grace. All the unnoticed actions, all the the grandmothers and schoolchildren and dog-walkers who get 25 seconds at the very end of the weekly news, all of them turn their open faces into the wind, blinking into a future even 3 degrees different than the one that is coming. It would make you shiver, if you looked, if you could see it all, all at once, around the world, the people and their actions winking with light.

Light the soft yellow of butter under industrial foil, peeled back by hungry, grinning kids in the free-lunch line. Light the color a plant feels, untended too long in blinds-drawn room, now moved outdoors, drinking in every color but green. Light like the wonder of an improbably turquoise northern coastline, maybe you’d call it sea-green teal, or maybe the precise word for that color doesn’t exist in some languages, in English for example, but in any tongue the word for faith feels just the same.

Light is every color, like your skin and my eyes, our ancestors curled within us — like all of us together, halogen-bright, Times Square visible from space. It’s the color of darkness lifting, if you look.

But it’s habit to fume on the 405. Far easier to hook your mind on that social post that is probably offensive, although the reasons elude you as you scroll.

And yet, there is light. And there are the people. People stitching the world back together, standing against the tide, silently mending our broken hearts.