the-color-behind-closed-eyes-aj-russo

I know. The title sounds like a scrapped John Greene novel, or something that might be
on the intro page of a poetry student’s dream journal. Okay? I know. But I’m not talking
about my dreams. I don’t like talking about my dreams; they are unsettlingly vivid to my
real life up until my brain decides to pull an M. Night Shyamalan twist on me and cut my
foot off. I’m not writing an entire essay about that. When I say “the color behind my
eyes,” I mean that literally. Whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed by the world around me
or the thoughts in my own head, I take a moment, close my eyes, and watch the colors.

~

My first memory of the colors is not a specific one, but one of many. I am so young,
young enough to want to share a room with my younger sister despite us living in a
three bedroom house. My hair is long, and wet from my shower. I splay it back on my
pillow so it doesn’t tickle my neck, and I like the tension on my scalp. My back is still
warm and raw from where my mom had scratched it for me under my waffle-knit
pajamas, as she did every night. My feet are hot but my face is cool and damp. My
sister breathes heavy and deep, and I have gotten sick of imagining there being two
cartoonish men watching us from the closet.

As a sort of surrender, like saying “Fine. I’ll play your game.” I close my eyes,
beginning my final ritual before sleep shuttles me to the next morning. The colors
explode– no. They will, but not yet. Now they are only swirling gently, barely visible as if
they were deep into the horizon, obscured by atmosphere. Then they grow like waves,
cresting brightly and evaporating into ethereal fractals before they could crash back
down. The colors are cool now; wine dark violets, clouds of pine green, some heights of
dusty pink, faded blood red, all mixing like a throbbing bruise. But as they grow, the
fractals becoming a constant twisting and shifting kaleidoscope, they become stark against the old swirling calm of blue-gray, commanding my full attention. The explosions
have begun.

I watch my fireworks, though without the noise and smell I could not and still cannot
stand, only accompanied by the light ringing in my ears as the sounds of my sister fade
away. I am in a half sleep now. Still aware of myself and the room around me, but no
longer experiencing it as something real. My body no longer belongs to me, I have no
control, it is at the mercy of the swirling visions of my eyelids. And as the kaleidoscope
continues it becomes calmer again, swaying gently back and forth as it beckons me in. I
become one with it. Seasick at first as my body rocks with it, but then it swaddles me in
light, placing me back into my bed, and rocks me. My stomach shifts and dips as I am
pushed back and forth. I am not moving but my body believes it is. Back and forth. Rhythmic. Back and forth. I still feel the raw love scratched into my back, I love you still
hot breath on my ear. Back and forth. I am taken somewhere my brain cannot recall but
my body remembers. Swaddled, loved, swaying back and forth.

Back and forth.

I don’t even notice as I begin to dream, the colors melding with them as they come.

~

And as the world goes, I would be roughly awoken with love, hating myself for not
relenting to sleep sooner as hot red light shines through my eyelids. My throat tastes
like bile, my sheets have never been cozier, and my dad sings a well-intentioned but
poorly-received melody; “It’s tiiiime for schooooooool.”

I still have pages of “About Me” worksheets, all with various forms of “author and
illustrator” scribbled on them in crayon. I was both blessed and cursed to know what I
wanted to do for the rest of my life before I even started kindergarten. I was blessed
because I could lay out my path before me, planning and plotting each detail to get me
there in the most efficient way my little brain could manage. Cursed because the
American school system had no regard for my careful planning. Despite my
assuredness, I still continued through a curriculum that granted, at most, one art class
per week up until high school.

This is all to say I was bored in school. Who wasn’t? I know that there are very few
out there that truly loved what the school system had to offer, but my specific boredom,
boredom from knowing there were a million other things I could be doing that would be
more relevant to my own determined path, was a nasty monster. This monster, coupled
with “gifted” status and undiagnosed AuDHD created something that many of my
teachers assumed was thus: “A child who doesn’t care.”

This child did care, just not about whatever they were talking about.

Instead, I delved into whatever book I had that week, or doodled on the back of
blank worksheets. Of course, there were the occasional teachers who would attempt to
force my caring by clearing my desk of any distraction. This did not work. My head would turn to a swivel, reading posters, watching geese out the windows, zoning out,
but occasionally, I would return to the colors.

Often without the exhaustion of late night, the colors take some coaxing. I would
lean onto my desk, place my fingers over my lids, and squish.

There is a more audible element here. Once the droning of the teacher has been
sufficiently drowned out, I only hear the movement of my eyes against their lids,
escaping air and saline creating a sound parallel to walking with wet shoes. The colors
feel less like a sober trip into my own brain and more like a genuine physical reaction.
The room is still with me; if I focus, I could listen to the teacher, but the whole point is
not to listen.

This activity feels more like solemn meditation, a state that I can move in and out of
by freewill. I facilitate this escape. It is not me being beckoned into a swaddle of love
and sensory bliss. I am running from a space I feel unwelcomed in. I do not feel I belong
here, so let me be somewhere different. This space is born from otheredness, it feels
hot and volatile but at least I’m not out there. No longer a swaddle of love, the colors
now function as protection from misunderstanding. And they look completely different.

The dark-blue gray is replaced by a dark red-gray, a frustrated color that battles with
the fluorescent lights of the classroom. The colors overlay like a boiling pot, no longer a
slow-moving sea. The bubbles grow from a deep sickly green to a quick flash of yellow
before they fade back to red-gray. My fingers dance across my lids, the only limit to their
ferocity being the pain in my eyes. Crackling veins of red-hot lighting pierce the boiling
sea when a movement is particularly painful. The geometry here is near nonexistent,
with only occasional glimpses into what I might see during the swaddle translucently
overlaid onto my angry tirade as if to say, “Don’t worry, we’re still here.”

I do not last long here, the only true enjoyment I get from the visuals is the control I
have with how the colors respond to my touch. But the feeling is grating. My eyes burn
and my fingers are overheated, sticky, and taut. Having my eyes closed has made me
tired, and now I not only long to just be somewhere else but now I want specifically to
be back in bed, which won’t be allowed until that yearning fades and the cycle repeats.
The message is clear: escape is not allowed.

I put my head down on the cool desk, feeling a tightness develop in my chest. You
do not belong here, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

~

The colors are not as bright now. They hardly escalate past the swirling dark sea
anymore. Many might create a link there between the loss of my colors and the loss of
my childhood, a new lull in creativity and wonder exchanged for an apartment and
unending bills. But I feel more creative than ever; I’m trying new things, learning more
than I ever did in grade school, moving toward my goals one steady step at a time. It is
imperfect, but from the loss of color I gained independence. There is no one to tell me to sit and listen even if I have no interest to, there is no one telling me to sleep when it is
the last thing on my mind. Having the ability to choose to do those and many other
things has made them so sweet they are no longer something to dread, but something I
ache to do when they are absent. My cries I had for escape when I was young have
been lovingly answered with time, bringing me a community who understands, and the
choice to choose my own path with confidence.

When I was being swaddled, using the colors to escape my racing brain, I could not
fathom that I would someday embrace sleep as a space to respect not avoid. When I
was trapped in a classroom, using even the most uncomfortable experience to escape
from a place I felt alien, I could not fathom a place where I was learning without feeling
tied to my chair. My escapes are here, still with the world, enjoying what I love about it in
the purest form I can feasibly access. Having those impossible things surrounding me,
omnipresent in every day I wake to look at my world, they are more colorful than
anything I have seen with my eyes closed.