Colors

He was cold, and that was about all he knew.

Dressed lightly in a cheap beige jacket and a too short pair of pants, he tilted his head upward to the sky. Years ago—he had no idea how many—he had been so certain that the sky was blue. Now, it was a mixture of blue and gray and sadness and white...He wasn’t even sure exactly what he saw. Was sadness even a color?

Perhaps the bitter numbness of winter had enveloped him for too long. Maybe it had addled his mind into delirium, but as the man looked up at the sky, he felt more at peace than ever before.

He touched the brown cap upon his head. Vaguely, he remembered how he had received it. As a gift, he thought. He had once had a family. A loving family with a mother and a cute six year old daughter. Now, love was only a color to the man, a pale red to splatter across the sky like paint on a canvas.

A canvas? thought the man. Canvases were expensive. Why had he thought ‘canvas’? Surely he had meant to compare love to blood sewn across a wartime battleground.

No, that wasn’t it. Love stopped war. Or did it? Did love start or end war? The man couldn’t remember. What was love again? A color?

Only a color.

The man looked back to the sky. Had it seemed so red before? It seemed that the sky had been splotched with something else too.

Love?

What color was that?

If only he could go back in time, back to his family, coated in the color of love. But when was that? Was his family even existent, or only a figment of a wild fantasy induced by these hard times? Still, something as important as family couldn’t be forgotten. So was the man imagining it, since he couldn’t recall any details about his wife or child? Or maybe, the man decided, family was only a color. Family was a color, right? Just like love. And they must have gone well together, like blue and green, orange and yellow, because...

Well, the man wasn’t too sure. Did family and love go hand in hand? Or were they opposites, like red and green, or blue and orange.

Maybe he was imagining the sky above him too, with its blue and gray and sadness and white blend of colors. Maybe the sky was actually purple, or green, or anger, or yellow. Maybe the sky was blue. But wasn’t the sky already blue? The man looked again. Was that color blue? Or was it green?

Slowly, and unsteadily, the man began to walk. He tried to walk towards the sky, to find out what color it was. If he could reach it, perhaps the sky would allow him to ask. But the sky was so far above him, the man feared he would never reach it.

The sky couldn’t just float there, could it? Being so big, it must be heavy. Heavy things couldn’t float. Something must be holding it up, thought the man. It was perfectly logical that if he found the end of the sky, he would find what was holding it up. Then, he could meet the sky.

So where did the sky end? The man squinted into the distance. Ah! There! The sky ended right on the horizon line, where it met the ground. The man was sure of this, because the sky and ground were different colors.

He set off, following the sidewalk to where the sky met the ground on the horizon line. He  hoped that the distance wasn’t so great. Hunger gnawed at his stomach. Soon, he forgot his purpose for walking, the hunger bothered him so much.

Or, at least, he thought it did. The man pondered the matter for a while, before concluding that hunger must be a color too! What else could it have been? He couldn’t remember what hunger was other than a color.

He was still walking. For days, it seemed, he did nothing else but walk. Walk towards the horizon, where the sky met the ground, for reasons unknown to anyone but him. Why was he walking? The man had forgotten. But he knew that he had to reach the horizon.

His legs gave out from under him. It was sudden. One moment, he was walking, almost running, along. The next, he was sprawled out against the sidewalk, his legs twisted in a fashion that they should not have been allowed to do so. The breath had been knocked out of his lungs, and he felt something that he would have once called pain. The man threw up, but he had nothing in his stomach. Only gastric acid spewed from his couth, mixing with a sticky red liquid crawling up his sidewalk.

Time froze for the man.

He stared at the mixture, touched it with his hand. Then, tentatively, he reached down and touched the distortion that had once been his knee. It seemed wet, as if it were leaking. The man looked at the knee after straining to move his neck.

The same redness.

Or was it only red? What was it, if it wasn’t red? A color, surely. Where did it come from? The answer hit him like a ton of bricks. Of course.

The red was love.

Wasn’t love the reason for his journey? Wasn’t love the reason he had to reach the horizon? He hadn’t been sure before, but now he was certain. One way or another, love had something to do with the horizon.

And now, love would be the end of him.

The man knew he was crawling towards the end of his life. He wasn’t old, but he was weak, and poor. The red liquid surely meant no harm, yet it brought destruction. The man felt he had not eaten in weeks. He would not survive the love. He would die. But he wasn’t afraid. What was life? It seemed so insignificant compared to the comfort colors brought the man. So what if life was a color? Yes, surely life was only a color. Nothing more, nothing less. Wouldn’t that mean death was a color too? There was nothing to fear from colors.

He never saw nor heard the frenzy around him. It was all a mixture of colors, blending, mixing, and swirling. It was the color of panic as everyday pedestrians shrieked at his blood and vomit spiraling down the drain, horror’s pale hue as a brawny man tried to call the ambulance...

The man felt he was leaving his world already, nothing more to lose...

But there would be no colors in death for the man who died on the sidewalk.