Myopia

It had been almost fifty years. The younger generation didn’t even know what it was, let alone remember it. Methods to preserve it had long since been abolished or forgotten— forbidden even. Worst of all, we didn’t even understand why.

They wouldn’t tell us. At first, I thought they just didn’t know either. But the older I got, the more I realized that my mother was keeping things from me. It wasn’t what she couldn’t tell me— it was that she wouldn’t. She would dismiss me whenever I asked about it anymore, like it was a trade secret I wasn’t privileged enough to be privy to.  

But my mother had seen it.

Color.

From what little I’d gathered she’d been sixteen when the world went black and white. But it wasn’t just my mother whose lips were sworn to be as silent as a mossy headstone. There was frustratingly little my generation knew about what was now known as the Great White-Out. They barely touched on it in school. We were lucky if it was even talked about at all, and if it was, it was hardly a mention; like a little blip in time the older generation was embarrassed to admit to. 

Or afraid. 

My mother had been more inclined to tell me stories when I was little. “Fairytales”, she’d called them. She spoke of forest magic, of a sky that proudly wore the ‘richest cerulean hue’, of ‘dewy emerald-studded grass’, and ‘soothing brown’ that looked just how the garden soil smells after a good rain.

 Not that I had any concept of blues, or greens, or browns. But I liked to imagine there was more to us than shades of grey and clouds of smoke. But none of the stories she told were tales you could find in books. She told them like she was there, like she could taste the very colors she described in such explicit detail. When I got older, she stopped telling me those bedtime stories, and so I searched. But I never found them. 

The sounds of the city with the echoes of traffic and the machines now drowned out any hope for anyone to hear the whispers of the past. They were simply ghosts floating around as chilling breezes, unable to guide the young and enlighten the old like they once did; proving the words of the old adage: those who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, are doomed to repeat them. 

And my generation was doomed.

But whenever I sat in front of my easel, and let my brush wander across the white canvas, I often found myself daydreaming about the color my mother described so vividly. 

What was it like? 

What would my brush strokes look like if they were anything but black and white? I tried so hard to imagine it, but all I could ever see in my head was grey, and all of its shades: ater grey, canesco, ceramic, ravus, sinza. Grey was all I had ever known. Was grey all I will ever know?

Had our magic really destroyed the most beautiful visions known to man like they said? It was all the information we were ever given, and I hadn’t gleaned much more than that. Not even how, or why, or by whom. Just that magic had obliterated color, and that the rivers of manna that had flowed naturally through the blood of gifted individuals was no longer utilized. Eventually, even in such a short life-time, it faded away into obscurity, until many of my peers were convinced that maybe it had just never existed at all. 

Truthfully, I wish I could tell you what I believed, but I wasn’t sure. Magic seemed like such a far-fetched concept in our rapidly advancing techno-mechanical reality– or what we thought we knew of it. But something about it intrigued me. The idea of it felt clean, like a lungful of fresh air in contrast to our machines. 

Our factories, the smoke stacks of which reached high into the grey sky like a proverbial Babel, clouded our minds with even more endless seas of grey. Endless miles of gears. Mountains of coal. Smoke, fire, and steam carried our society on its back and gradually choked out any memories of the past. 

An empire devoid of color, and the magic of vitality. All smoke, and no mirrors.

Perhaps that was what drove me to take a History of Magic course at the beginning of my Junior year of college. There were maybe seven students enrolled in the old professor’s class, and I felt bad. He looked ancient, and after all, the old belief in the mere existence of magic was fast fading into irrelevance in lieu of the iron and steam age. But as he looked at us over his round-lense glasses, straightened his patterned knit vest, and plopped his worn stack of books on the oak desk, something kept me riveted.

Most folks his age were downright afraid to talk about magic, let alone slam down some dusty ancient books and begin a cryptic lecture on its origins.

“Magic.” The professor’s crinkled voice projects clearly into the lecture hall, demanding the attention of its scanty occupants. For a man as wrinkled as an unironed bedsheet, he sure sounded a lot younger than he appeared. But the lines of his face belied ancient wisdom that I had a feeling few possessed the mind to even begin to understand, let alone grapple.

He turns to scribble on the blackboard, letters I’ve never seen before. Curved and cryptic characters that seem to jump out of their chalky lines.

“What is it?” The question hangs over us like an undeciphered Rosetta Stone. 

The scrape of the chalk echoes loud in my ears. I follow every line, every notch it creates, pinched between the old, wrinkled fingers of wisdom. They almost seem to come alive at his fingertips, swimming on the board in archaic patterns. I adjust in my seat as I sit, pen and notebook out, at my desk, discreetly casting glances around the sparse occupancy to see if any of my classmates also see the way it glows, the way it comes to life in the air. 

The air itself begins to smell different. It feels charged, alive with a vibration that you can almost taste.

“Many refute any claims of its existence, simply because they don’t understand it. And humans…” he turns around, his light canesco eyes so piercing I swear he looks straight into me. Steady, calm, with no trepidation whatsoever.

 “…tend to fear things they do not understand.” 

A chill curls around my spine, cool tendrils sliding through the spaces between each vertebrae. He’s still looking at me, and for a minute I’m afraid maybe I forgot to brush my hair this morning, or there’s a second head sprouting from my shoulders. The look in his eyes is so intense, I wonder if anyone else notices how quiet the room has gotten. How breezy it suddenly feels. 

I glance around me to see if someone left a window open. 

All the panes are shut, but the cool whooshing around my ears seems to get louder.

 I look back at his weathered face. The look he gives me is not unkind. In fact, his features seem as if they’re made of benevolence. But I’m locked in place as he takes what feels like ages to read me, like he’s sorting through every genome in my body in search of something. 

I feel naked. Mentally stripped, as if memories I didn’t even know I had were being sorted through. Memories that don’t feel familiar flash before me in grainy, flickering visions. My head begins to hurt as it swirls through it all, and in such a short amount of time, I feel as if I’m seeing through a thousand different pairs of eyes.

But just as quick it came, the rushing fades, and his analytical gaze releases me. The air calms again, but try as I might, I can no longer remember a single frame of memory that had flooded my psyche only a moment ago.

Memory that didn’t even belong to me. 

I’m disoriented. But why? No one else in the room seems to have stirred… in fact, it looks as if a few of my seatmates are nearly dozing. The others look bored, the remaining few skeptical.

The professor sets down the pencil of chalk on the ledge of the board, dusting his hands. Each movement he makes is calculated and thoughtful, as he turns back to face us, elbow in one hand, chin in the other.

“Learning to accept the things you don’t understand is a key component in one’s growth. And while it may seem trivial to you young people now, often-times the fate of your future relies on your ability to absolve the past.”   

I think I’m going crazy. I must be. I steal a glance back toward the windows one more time, but just like before, each and every one of them are shut and latched. The gentle breeze outside doing nothing more than fluttering the weeds that grow up through the cracks on the outside window ledge.

There’s a poppy that I never noticed before, bending in the breeze. Something about it draws my attention. It looks… off. Different. Yet it’s something arbitrary that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Oh, I’m definitely going crazy if a flower is Ganzfeld effect-ing me. I rub my eyes, trying to convince myself that it’s just the five hours of sleep and the dozen assignments I have breathing down my neck that’s making me hallucinate things. It feels like the sinza shades of the petals flicker for a moment and then-

“Open your eyes. You may yet see something you previously denied the existence of.”

I blink again. The poppy looked… warm. And it wasn’t very saturated, but it looked how a crackling fire feels on a cold night. Or how a hot summer day warms your skin. Or a fever. Or how the taste of a juicy strawberry tickles every tastebud on your tongue. It almost hurt my eyes, faint as it was. But it continued to glow at me, like it was trying to tell me something as the professor’s voice droned on in the background. 

And somewhere deep inside me, something responded.