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1. There is a mathematical formula { R = e ^{– t/s} } which plots the erosion of memory over time where Retrievability is Euler’s number to the negative power of Time over the Stability of memory. They call this the Forgetting Curve.
2. What this means is that memory fades.
3. Red is —

4. Color blindness afflicts men at a rate several times that of women. The most common form is dichromatism, the confusion of red and green. Dichromats have difficulty distinguishing a Braeburn apple from a Granny Smith, the grids of a tartan plaid, a green from a red light.
5. (How unsurprising is it, then, that they have such difficulty distinguishing between stop and go?)
6. My mother wore Yves Saint Laurent Rouge Pur 7, a waxy magenta lipstick that swiveled out of a 4-sided gold tube like an art deco rendition of an Egyptian talisman. She was always late and so it was only in the seconds before exiting the car after a mad drive across the city that she would smear rouge over her lips and dot it across her cheeks, frantically smudging the pigment up toward her temples to paint that startling pink streak so emblematic of the 80s. Sometimes she’d do the same to me, turning me into the same garish creature that I would spend the next 20 years trying to shed.
7. In 1986, a 65-year-old painter wrote to the late neurologist Oliver Sacks complaining of total colorblindness after a concussion sustained when a truck rammed into the side of his car. In the months that followed, the world receded. Azure sky and white clouds flattened into a dull grey, tomatoes a dead black, his wife’s flesh the color of a rat. Painting became impossible; sex, revolting.
8. Blood splashes a lifeless black on cyan, the vivid blue-green of hospital scrubs. This is no accident. At some point they’d decided that splatters of red on white were tawdry.
9. In the beginning of our courtship, he sent me a photo of an arteriovenous malformation that he had operated on that day. The dark tangle of veins, whose rupture earlier that month had nearly killed the 23-year-old patient, sat flatly on top of the brain. I marveled at its fatty pinkness, framed by the bony white border of skull. The scalp, peeled back and pinned down, was visible along the periphery. A friend asked if this was the neurosurgeon’s equivalent of a dick pic. I said probably—both brain and dick are pink, soft, and full of the same blood that splashes a dull black on cyan.

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1. Retrieval-induced forgetting is a process by which retrieving an item from long-term memory impairs subsequent recall of related items. This is to say that the more we remember, the more we forget.
2. Sometimes I saw it only in memories, in the lonely light of looking back. That was blue, I’d remember— that yellow house was blue, as if an affliction of a reverse color blindness of blue.

3. When I was 3, my uncle taught me how to operate the VHS machine in my bedroom by counting the buttons: 5 from left was PLAY, 4 was REW, 3 was EJECT. I spent much of waking life as a toddler watching and rewatching my small collection of Disney tapes: Snow White, Bambi, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, Alice in Wonderland, The Sword in the Stone, Fantasia—though this one I seldom watched as I hated those menacing brooms dancing in formation. Alone in my room, I watched my tapes from morning till night.

   My favorite among them was the one who pricked her finger on a spindle and fell asleep for 100 years, the one with hair down to her waist and a long, narrow face that even then I understood was beautiful. My own hair was kept very short like a boy’s until grade school. Even now I recall the rage of seeing little girls everywhere with long hair. That rage never left me.

4. 3 weeks ago someone told me that my hair looked different. I knew what he meant because I’d noticed, too, because half of postpartum and post-abortive women report some degree of hair loss; because I’d been having anxiety attacks about it, staying up until all hours of the night peering at my scalp like a lunatic. Moments when I snapped out of the hysterical daze and saw my horrible reflection in the mirror — mouth agape, eyes bulging, fistfuls of hair in each hand — I thought: Medusa. Medusa, the woman raped by Poseidon then punished for it, transformed by Athena into a creature so terrible to behold that her mere look turned men to stone. Because it was her hair and body that tempted him, it was her hair and body that were condemned. What injustice wrought upon her, betrayed by her own body! Medusa, that awful face of feminine rage looked back at me, night after night in the bathroom mirror.
5. And so every day I slipped that tape into the VHS machine and followed Aurora from birth to childhood to her fateful 16th birthday when she pricked her finger on that spindle. I watched her sleep in a high blue room. I watched dark vines spread over her castle in irreversible nightfall. I watched Prince Phillip hack through brambles to kiss his comatose beauty. I watched all of this, every day, just to get to my favorite scene at the end: Aurora and Phillip, now married, waltz across the palace floor as it dissolves, giving way to a blanket of clouds. The 3 fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, look on from above, waving their wands to the beat of Tchaikovsky’s “Grande valse villageoise.” With each triplet, the clouds and Aurora’s dress change from pink to blue and back again, and on and on for 30 seconds until the animation miniaturizes, descending neatly into the background as a leather-bound book-cover closes shut. This was how I knew the story was real.
6. Color blindness can also be acquired from a blunt trauma to the head.
7. And so for 2 years, I lived with, loved, and submitted to someone who told me, repeatedly, to stop thinking so much, to leave the gray for the green. But then what? The present is little more than a fleshy hologram which distorts on sight and disperses on contact: an insipid flicker, a noon shadow.
8. One August morning I stepped out under the harsh glare of Teutonic light to a searing pain in my left eye, as if singed with acid. I collapsed onto the pavement. At the hospital, the ophthalmologists chastised me, grew angry when I apologized for what I’d done to myself. I stayed in a lightless room for the 2 weeks following, the curtains drawn, as my eye healed from the corneal abrasion.

9. When Joni Mitchell was 8, she contracted polio and was quarantined in a hospital, strapped to a bed and immobilized as it was believed that any movement might cause the disease to spread. She remained alone in that room, stiff on her back, for several months. Was this when she began seeing blue?

   That summer I found myself playing Blue in my car over and over not because I liked her shrill voice but because I didn’t know why I did, until one day I heard the words

   I am a lonely painter

   and suddenly I understood—I was a lonely painter, and had always been.

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1. There are memories of specificity and memories of multiplicity which bleed into one another like an endless film reel, flickering to an unknown rhythm. Ghosts tripping the wires. Vague dread of standing at the curb long after all the other children had gone home. I can recall clearly looking down the open road, how the sky at that hour so quickly darkened from blue to black.
2. Darkness is the balm, that which softens the world’s hard edges. Out the window, our stalks of amaranth shot up like jeweled bullets.
3. There is a name for the color seen by the mind’s eye in perfect darkness, that off-black of an almost- absence. They call this Eigengrau:

4. In 1999, a man named Nicholas White was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours with no phone, watch, or water. Consider that humans can expect to live about 3 days, or 72 hours, without water. At 41 hours, he was more than halfway at death’s door. Whatever happened to him inside that elevator led to the loss of his marriage, job, apartment, and all of his life savings.
5. Do They Know That in China:

6. For the 7 days following my abortion, I boiled 7 dates in milk nightly until their bodies distended and dissolved into a curdled ambrosia, tinged yellow by a spoonful of turmeric. Alone in my apartment, I stirred this sludge with a wooden spoon and drank it with the formless conviction that some would call hope. I’d wanted something more, you see—something esoteric, something pagan. Looking back, I wanted something magical.
7. At some point, I’d begun to see blue where it did not exist as it was. First I saw it in burgundies because I knew that the mystery of its purply scarlet was borne from a tinge of blue. Then I saw it in whites simply because I knew it was there. I saw it in black when it shimmered to a near navy in sunlight and in the striations of wood because I imagined that once a blue-eyed woman cast her gaze on it. I saw it in the concrete slabs downtown which hid hundreds of people inside wearing blue as if blue were something they could take off.

8. Cavafy asks,

   How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

9. After the amaranth, chive blossoms sprouted in their place, little heads of periwinkle peeping from the window box. I didn’t remember planting them, or I didn’t know they’d bloom. We shouldn’t have. It was a mistake.

   So I let them die, too.

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