Color has drained from the face. This feels like a permanent state. I run my hands through water and take them to skin. The mirror feeds back flesh that I don’t recognize. It is tired, lined, mine? Mine. Also, 2020’s.

In their sum, the year’s days feel collectively drained of a pigment. Each person has lived their unique permutation of difficulty: unemployment or inability to work, loneliness or quarters that are too cramped, lack of sleep, or safety, or space, loss of taste, or of life, and for some, simply boredom. And I’d venture to say that for many, 2020 might feel like a year that has bled out its colors.

Memories of a coffee in, rather than from, anywhere, of an unpreoccupied city roam – these come to me not in surgical mask pallor, but in brights: green on avocado toast in a deli, red on a theater curtain and blue sky from a cruising altitude. A golden saxophone on a cobblestoned city block. The color of a hug and the hue of a new friendship. The shade of getting lost in a bookstore. The tone of a body really at rest. I’ll stop, for I am not here to tell you. We each have a different version of color schemes gone missing.

This summer I wrote of my not-so-revolutionary pandemic strategy, which boiled down to

Just keep waking up every day,

for I had no better answer. “Wade through the mud,” my sister would say, and I think this is the same thing.

The only way is through, I concluded to the problem of the pandemic, which is, of course, the only conclusion I might have come to with any basis in reality. And yet it has been extraordinarily tempting to dabble in escape: what if I just booked a flight to a tropical island?

            Reality has taken a stark tone, black ink against white paper, and the only way through has indeed been to keep trudging.

            Last month I started a morning breath practice that works with timed holds (long story for a future blog post, but yes, what constitutes “activity” now includes breathing). My phone is my timer, and in an attempt to stay clear-head before breathing (yes, laugh, okay), I’ve manipulated the device to remove all color from it. The apps and background noise fade to a grey mutter. What I see in those early hours is a black and white rendition of my chosen background, which is a photograph taken of my daughter and me a few days into her life. We are both on our sides wearing smiles in the other’s direction.

The photo is more memory than depiction – because what color was my shirt? What was the exact shade of her hair? In place of these details: my infatuation, her smell, post-partum sweats that soaked sheets and stitches in healing, the muteness of exhaustion, her bird cry. These are born from the greyscale, given more space to breathe in the absence of color. This is what makes Dorothea Langue’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo impeccable. This is what paints the Paris of Andre Kertesz.

When my daughter was born, I learned that infants cannot see. My daughter’s newborn world was one of sensation. Of voice and smell and milk and sleep. Her eyes could not focus. And when focus came several months later, it was for my black-and-white leggings, a stuffed panda bear, a zebra on a page. What did she gather from the colorless world? My daughter’s earliest days have left me with the conviction that humans are creatures born seeing, really seeing, in a way that is fully lucid and true. Color isn’t at all necessary.

We left an apartment this year in a precipitous and pandemic-driven move. As I stood in it for the final clear-out, the light inside was dim. The walls fell with shadows against a new coat of white that covered places where paintings had hung, where DIY projects had begun, been abandoned or botched, where we streaked the corridors with black from suitcases bumped on our way out to the airport (late) or back from it (carrying with us stories of color: Tokyo in a rainstorm, a game of cards in a different hemisphere, a missed flight). The apartment echoed in proof of all that it held – a new friend, a fresh start, that concert, the disappointments, that argument, that dinner party. There, where you sang the night before we got married. There, where we danced that night to that 90s playlist.  There, where you hit your head for stitches.

The night of the stitches, I watched while a junior doctor sewed a forehead, and as the red was seamed shut, blood drained from my face. I felt it go with a head bob. With the involuntary nod I fell to the floor. My vision went black.

This is a healthy stress reaction in the body, although I do not have the medical term for it. Blood drains from the face. To where?  

It goes straight to the heart.  And this is a place, I have come to understand in its moments, that can also very much see. Sometimes, better in monochrome. Torture or teacher, my sister would say.

In the freshly cleared apartment, I return from my memory of the stitches to see light pass over the space. I can see another couple moving in. I see a new sofa in the living room and in a different spot. Another’s plates and cups. The walls repainted yellow. The place has been the briefest keeper of moments and time, leaving now just hues for the heart.

I yelled expletives alone in the apartment, sobbed and returned the keys.

That night I had a dream, and the dream was just a phrase, and the phrase repeated itself in sleep so that I remembered it in the morning.

the light right now is golden

I woke and wondered if I could remember to see the glow through the monochrome.

If this year has you seeing in greyscale, if the days have lost their colors, also know that glow needs no pigment, and that you have known this all along.