Color My World
She was born in a grayscale world. Actually, she was colorblind, completely color blind from the minute she was born until now- her fourteenth birthday.
Her name was Eliza, she wore thick heavy glasses and had frizzy black hair. She was strange to the kids in her school because she was herself, and not to mention the fact that her mom still picked out her clothes for her because she couldn’t see the colors. She generally ignored the kids, trying to hide her growing depression over the fact that she was colorblind. She stood tall and proud, usually.
Usually.
Today, she was hunched over in her pretty pink and white birthday dress (she got compliments on the color from her relatives, and she numbly nodded her head and pursed her lips) her knees pressed together and drawn up to her chest. She sat on the cliff’s edge overlooking the black and gray waters beneath, the ocean extended out and the white sun high in the gray sky.
Her party went on behind her, her parents were loving the attention they were getting over their newest addition to the family, a little boy they had adopted named Jerry.
Jerry was about five or six, Eliza had no idea, and had curly blond hair, a cute little button nose and rosy cheeks. His eyes were, supposedly, a crystal blue the color of water. To Eliza the color names of “blue” “red” “violet” were all just words. They held no meaning other than silently providing her something to envy from everyone else.
Eliza glanced over her shoulder, looking back at the party and her relatives, the few cousins she had avoiding her for whatever reason. Jerry was twirling around in a pair of overalls and a tiny white shirt, his eyes wide and excited as he danced with the balloon in his hands.
Eliza let out a sigh and turned back to the dark ocean, eyes angry.
She remembered a conversation with her father from earlier and rested her chin in her hands;
“Daddy?” she teetered up to her father, he was sitting down in a recliner chair and had the day’s paper on his lap. He folded it up in half by creasing the middle with his fingers and looked up at her,
“Yes, sweet pea?”
she smiled a little, “What color are my eyes?”
He looked a little shocked at first, but the surprise faded quickly and he smiled, “Green.”
“So….What’s that look like?”
Without hesitation, he reached over, pulled her into his lap and said, “Beautiful.”
Now, Eliza wondered what beautiful looked like. It was hard to see beauty in a world filled with black and gray and white. She decided that if she ever could see colors, then she would dye her hair rainbow, would paint her room bright and would wear a different color everyday. She would-
“Leeza?” she jumped and turned, brow creasing at the sight of her new little brother. He stumbled over and plopped down next to her, a bottle of green bubble soap in his had and the little pink wand in the other.
“Mhm…” Eliza turned back to the sea, realizing suddenly how close she was to the edge and in turn how close Jerry was too. She stood up and motioned for him to follow, he went easily, focusing mainly on dipping the wand of the brush exactly right into the bubble soap. She smiled a little and led him over to a picnic table, picking him up and sitting him down on it when he refused to do so himself. She looked up and got a thumbs up from her father and she waved him off, turning back to Jerry when he said, “Leeeeeeeeeezaaaaaaaaa.”
She rolled her eyes, “Yeah?” he dabbed the bubble wand in the soap again and raised it up to his tiny lips, blowing air out. She watched the bubble form and smiled a little, turned to look back at her dad and then did a double take.
It was tiny. About the size of a quarter and floating past her face now, and she stood up to chase it, running past the tables with her cousins and the relatives whose names she didn’t know. It rose up past her face then and she caught a gleam of it in the sunlight.
‘Are those….colors?’
In the tiny sphere, or actually, around the tiny sphere, Eliza saw things she had never seen. Colors she couldn’t name but new the names of, pinks and reds and blues and greens she had never seen before. She reached out with thin, shaking fingers and touched the fragile surface.
The bubble popped.
She squeezed her eyes shut and wrinkled her nose, her father put his hand on her shoulder and asked quietly, “You okay, honey?”
She opened her eyes and stared into her father’s blue ones. Eyes with color.
She grinned, “Perfect.”
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
