The color wheel of grief and the black shade of sorrow
Here I am, an old man, visiting an old love of mine, myself sickly, and you—long departed and deep under the ground and now, alas, deep under water, too. I have had to wade through knee-deep floodwater to come see you where you lie, asleep forever peacefully, unaware it must be that you continue to share the innumerable aggravations and expectations that come with the territory of being human and alive.
It is twilight and, as the sky grows darker and darker, all the candles left burning here and there in this waterlogged, seemingly godforsaken cemetery become brighter and brighter. The floodwater, meanwhile, reflects the scene of a starry, starry night.
I brought you flowers, my love, your favorite Easter lilies, white and colorless, yet in the gloaming dark they seem to phosphoresce with all the 120 colors there are from my grandson’s box of crayons.
Grief, after all, is not just an abstract, disembodied emotion or sentiment. It is as visible and palpable as a painter’s palette of many colors, colors that color and affect our thoughts, feelings, mood and behavior.
Death wasn’t the end but the beginning of an afterlife of pain. You are out of sight but not out of mind, no longer living but not dead, still marching, marching through my dreams and my waking hours. All I have left are two blue notes, one blood-red moon, and a black, battered heart.
All these years I’ve kept the doors and windows of my soul open, left all the lights burning white heat hot, inside this bleak-black House of Sad. Still, you would not come. Thus, thoughts of you lie stranded like a shipwreck, in the flooded, tortured chambers of my heart.
The only sanctuary I knew was you, my fortress, bastion, and citadel as well, the keep that used to keep me secure in my purpleness, safe in my blue. And so: that was most unfeeling of you, to leave me to winter long, in an endless summer of discontent.
Your leaving left me black-and-blue and indignantly indigo, feeling wronged, so very wrong, in all the right places. I’ve nibbled my crayons down to stubs, now damned to live my life in the blue, a world without magenta you, without color, without hue.
You saddened all the rivers in me, red-blushed it with the blood I bled, blue-hued it with the tears I shed. Here I am—pewter, pallid, and pale—dyed an inedible cobalt, stained an indelible blue, washed in the brown fog of rue.
I catch glimpses of you in all the nothings before me, in everything that is not there really. You were like the rainbow: not to be seen for long, not to be touched, never to be reached. There’s a price to pay for love—that technicolor dreamcoat—pain, pain of the deepest and blackest dye!
Wracked and wrecked for missing you, rent and riven since I lost you, this tired old river flows on, moving mauve and muddy, groping grey and gloomy. Loving you had taught me this—there are colors we cannot see, and the black shade of sorrow is the clean, clear color of love.
Antonio Calipjo Go,
sickbookstogo@gmail.com
