The Taste of Blue Light

I first noticed it in the hospital.

Not the blindness. That was obvious. Sudden. Total.

No — I noticed the color.

Or something like color.

Blue. But not blue like paint. Not blue like ocean or sky.

Blue like the sound of a cello bow.

Blue like missing someone you never met.

Blue like an ache behind the ribs you can’t explain.

They called it “visual hallucination.”

I called it truth.

---

I had lost my sight — a rare neurological incident, the doctors said. Something like a stroke. Or a fire in the brain that left the lights out. There were terms. Medical ones. I forgot them.

But I remembered the blue.

It would come at night. Not in my eyes, but somewhere deeper. The way dreams visit you — uninvited but intimate. It moved. It pulsed. Sometimes it smelled like jasmine. Other times, it felt like the warmth of someone almost touching you.

I began to crave it.

---

Days passed. Weeks.

People came to visit. They sat beside my bed and said things like:

> "At least you're alive."

"You're strong."

"You'll adjust."

They didn’t understand. I hadn’t just lost sight — I had entered another country. One with no maps. No roads. Just sensation.

In that country, blue was a friend. A language. A memory.

I stopped missing vision.

I started missing light.

---

Therapists said I was “dissociating.”

They gave me exercises. Feel the cup. Smell the fruit. Hear the fan. Anchor yourself.

I nodded.

But every time I closed my eyes, I saw more.

A field of colorless flowers blooming.

A man made of smoke, dancing on the ceiling.

A girl — maybe 7 years old — painting a wall with her heartbeat.

Who were they?

Fragments of me? Or others I had forgotten?

---

One night, I asked the nurse to turn off all machines.

She hesitated.

> “Even the heart monitor?”

“Especially that one,” I whispered.

Silence fell like snow.

And then — a new color.

Red.

Not angry. Not fire.

Red like grief.

Red like a letter you wrote but never sent.

It curled around my body. Made me shiver.

I wept.

---

I stopped talking to people. I stopped asking what time it was. I started writing in my head.

Not with words.

With color.

I tasted green when I remembered my father.

I heard violet when I thought of the woman I almost married.

And when I finally forgave myself for everything I never became —

I saw white.

Endless. Soft.

Not emptiness.

Completion.

---

A psychiatrist came in one morning, sat at the edge of my bed, and asked if I thought I was going mad.

I said, “No. I think I’m finally becoming real.”

She didn’t respond. She just wrote something down.

---

They say blindness sharpens other senses.

But I think it rewrites the soul.

You begin to see people not by how they look,

but by the temperature of their presence.

By the density of their silence.

By the shadows they carry but never name.

You begin to see the unseen.

---

I’ve learned to walk again.

With a cane, yes — but more with instinct.

I no longer memorize the layout of a room.

I feel its personality.

I smell where sorrow lives in a house.

I hear hesitation in a doorway.

And sometimes, when the world is quiet,

I close my eyes

and invite the colors back in.

---

Blue still visits me.

But now, I paint with it.

Not on canvas — on people.

A word. A gesture. A breath.

The woman who sat beside me on the train last week —

she was gold.

The boy playing violin on the street corner —

he was violet, glowing.

And me?

I am a tapestry of colors I no longer need to see

to know they exist.