By: Justine Payton
I grew up in a world of color.
Blue eyes, red hair, always dressed by my parents in forest green.
As a young girl, I organized my box of crayons by shade, a miniature wax rainbow contained within thin cardboard. I spent hours scribbling in coloring books, learning to draw within the lines.
My grandmother gifted me an easel for my tenth birthday, and I began to paint with watercolors. I marveled at the way blended reds and blues made purples, how I could pull fire out of mixing yellow and red.
My mother taught me the colors of ripeness when she packed my school lunches: the dark black of an avocado, the slow blush of an apple, the bright yellow of a banana.
My father taught me the colors of the sky on our weekend hikes: how the atmosphere refracts the sun’s light to create hues of rose and honey gold in the morning; crimson, amber and magenta at night.
My crazy aunt, the one who wore boots with flamingo pink fur and laughed too loud, taught me as a teenager that my face could be a canvas too: black eyeliner, blue eyeshadow, bubble-gum lip gloss.
I was in a high school physics class when I learned color requires light, that white is created when all visible wavelengths are reflected, and black by the absence of reflection.
I learned that gray is an achromatic color, defined unambiguously: without color.
I learned that colors come to us in waves.
When I went off to college to study art six hundred miles away from my hometown, I decorated my room with a mandala tapestry. Its intricate design of radiating greens, pinks, and orange: a stark contrast to the gray of the dormitory walls.
I painted and created in my classes: landscapes, portraits, abstracts, collages.
I made friends from all over the world—India, Japan, Scotland, Chile. We marked on a map our different homes, red-bulbed pins scattered across a blue-green Earth.
And when the days became shorter, I placed a lava lamp next to my bed. I watched the fuchsia blobs rise and fall without rhythm, dancing in a state of metamorphosis, before falling asleep.
***
The leaves had fallen vermillion and gold on the sidewalk when I was invited to a party. He greeted me at the door with red and green Jell-O shots. His arms rippled with muscles beneath a white t-shirt. “Girls get red,” he said, and I squeezed the slimy substance into my mouth and swallowed. Licking my lips, I tasted strawberries. He watched my tongue before turning away, bringing the green Jell-O shots to his guy friends playing beer pong nearby.
As I moved through the party, the colors around me began to fade.
Unconscious, I imagine the world would’ve seemed pitch black.
I woke up in his bedroom. He positioned my numb and lifeless limbs across the bed. My eyes, moving rapidly, sought an escape. But his body—white, glistening, hairy—was heavy. I focused my gaze on the only source of light: tacky plastic stars shining lime green above me.
I made a wish. It wasn’t answered.
***
The next morning I walked to my bathroom, legs held slightly apart to keep from rubbing together where a deep pain throbbed. I looked at myself in the mirror, felt my lips that were no longer glossed but thin and white.
In the place where my chest should have been, where fake pearls had previously settled, there was not the nude beige of my skin but an opaque, shadowy gray—as if grayscale had been applied where there once was color. It encompassed my neck, curved against my armpits, covered my breasts.
I traced the outline of its boundaries and felt nothing. I tried to smear the edges, to bring the surrounding color back inside of it, but the lack of reflection remained. Tears fell from my eyes as I stripped naked. Warm water washed away a residue of sweat and makeup, and when I cleaned between my legs, the soap burned.
They will blame me.
I had seen how other girls were questioned for the way they dressed, for the decisions they made to drink and get drunk. I watched with the rest of the world as they were called liars, life ruiners, sluts in court. In the news. On TV. I couldn’t remember if I had said no, stop, I don’t want this.
By the time the water turned cold and my fingers had pruned, I decided to tell no one.
Not about what happened, not about the gray shadow.
I wore a turtleneck sweater to class the following day, and no one seemed to notice my silence.
***
I discovered that I could forget about what happened when I drank. I could forget even more when I fucked.
So I drank and I fucked.
I drank and I fucked and I watched anxiously as the gray grew to cover more parts of my body. I thought that one day the color might return, but the emptiness just spread. Shadows appeared where the edges of my body should’ve been. My hair lost its color. My eyes turned the color of a rain-burdened sky. Soon it was only my hands that remained pink and veined with life.
Lying in bed one morning, I looked down at my body. My hands prickled and burned, the only part of me I could still feel. I rubbed the soft pad of my pinky finger, just as my mother had taught me to do whenever I was anxious. The skin pulsed between red and white as my fingers blocked and released blood like a dam. I thought of my mother seeing me like this, knowing what I had done, knowing what I had become.
Too much.
I took the scissors off of my desk, pressed the sharp edge into the lines of my palm. I slowly drained one hand of color, watching the ruby red drops drip away. Then I did the same to the other.
When it was done, I looked in the mirror.
I felt nothing. Neutral.
Gray shadows covered every inch of my body like ash. Achromatic.
***
Anyone can color in an outline, can do it any way they want. I learned as a child that outlines were a canvas for our desires—fillable, erasable, conquerable. As I walked through the world, I let others color me as they wished.
To my friends, I was the girl who now partied hard, who always knew where booze and drugs and boys could be found. They painted me scarlet.
To my parents, I was a newly independent adult, exploring opportunities and drifting away. I hid in the emerald green of their ignorance.
To the boys who fucked me, I was an easy whore. They preferred that I remain blank.
The world colored me invisible.
***
The brochure at the student counseling center pictured a smiling lady with long hair and a glistening smile. Amelia Lancey, PsyD.
During my initial appointment, we sat in silence for the first five minutes. White noise buzzed in the background and I shifted on the beige chair, sinking further into its depths. I couldn’t remember why I had decided this was a good idea.
“How are you feeling?” Her tone was airy, and her voice rasped slightly.
I stared at the floor, picking at the outline of my hand.
“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I’m here, though, however you need me.”
The silence became unbearable, so I said, “I feel like the noise.”
“The noise?”
I gestured to the door, where a small circular machine emitted the white noise meant to keep our conversations behind closed doors confidential. “Empty. Blank.” I paused, “Chaotic.”
Amelia’s voice became softer, like orange blending into yellow. “That must be a scary way to feel.”
I tested her eyes for authenticity. “No,” I said, “I feel nothing.”
She scribbled in her notebook, speaking as her pen scratched against the lined paper, “You don’t feel anything anymore. I wonder if something may have happened to make you feel that way?”
I watched the shadows of my toes flex against my flip flops, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Thirty minutes later, we scheduled another meeting for the following week.
“I look forward to seeing you, Annie. Take care.”
I hurried down the hallway to escape the silence.
***
I met with Amelia every week for two months. One day, there was a stack of coloring books and a box of crayons placed on the table beside me. Seeing the direction of my gaze, Amelia offered an explanation. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk if you’re doing something else at the same time. You can draw, if you want.”
I flipped through the pages of the first book, a hundred pages of horses. Arabian, Friesian, Clydesdale, Appaloosa, Mustangs.
I pointed to the page, hesitating for a moment before saying the words. “When I look in a mirror, this is what I see.”
Amelia nodded slowly as her eyebrows furrowed. “Can you help me understand?” Her pen moved quickly across the page.
I searched for the word before speaking. “An outline.”
Amelia’s pen stopped. “When did that first start?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She watched as I colored in one horse after another, each one filled with a singular color.
***
I told Amelia about the ways in which people filled in the outline of my body. While I blended shades of indigo and lavender in a coloring book of flowers, I described the emptiness of constantly being erased, filled, erased, filled. I told her what it felt like to be blank. Unrecognizable. She listened and wrote. She eventually stopped asking me why and when.
One day, I decided to give an answer anyway.
“It started after I was raped.”
“The outline?”
“Yes.”
Amelia put down her pen, leaned in towards me. The rain pattered faster and thunder rolled in the distance.
“I’m so sorry that happened, Annie. Thank you for trusting me, for telling me.” She reached across to lay her hand on top of mine, and I felt warmth. At the place where her hand met my own, there was a growing circle of color. My skin pulsed pink, alive.
I pulled away, tears poking at my eyes for the first time in almost a year.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
***
I skipped the next session.
I stared at my hands, eyes darting from palms to scissors.
I picked up my phone and called Amelia. She left a voice message earlier in the day when I hadn’t shown up. I didn’t listen to it.
“Annie?”
“Hi.”
“Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know.” I took a deep breath, held it for three seconds, let it go.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“We can just stay on the phone for a bit, if you want?” Her voice was kind. She took an inhale, waiting.
“Okay.”
I sat with the phone pressed against my ear, listening to the way in which the two of us breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. Five minutes passed, then ten.
“I’ll see you next week,” I whispered.
I hung up the phone, looked down at my hands. Still full of color. I touched my cheek, felt warmth pulse against warmth. In the mirror, my eyes shone blue, and I recognized my face as my own.
***
Amelia sat across from me, her legs crossed beneath a periwinkle pencil skirt. I doodled in a new coloring book, one filled with random designs of intermingling shapes and lines.
“Have you ever told anyone else about what happened?”
I knew what she was referring to, and shook my head. When I looked up, our eyes met.
“I wonder how it would feel to tell your parents.”
Tears fell from my eyes onto the page. Crying came easy now, and sometimes I watched as the tears traced paths across my cheeks. I could catch one on my fingertip, look closely, see how it reflected light, wonder how it captured sadness.
“I couldn’t.”
Amelia didn’t look away. “Telling your parents would feel really hard.”
I pressed the red tip of a razzmatazz crayon into the page, snapped it in half. “It would break them.”
Amelia pressed, “How do you know that?”
My hands wrung together in my lap, twisting my skin painfully. The parts with color were the parts that could hurt. “Because it broke me.”
She placed her hands over mine, just as she had done a few weeks ago. “You believe it will break them like it broke you.”
I don’t look up, but she continues, “No wonder you feel like you can’t tell them.”
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, inhale. Damn’t Annie, just breathe.
“But you’ve told me about your parents, Annie. It seems like they love you a lot. It might be hard for them to hear, but I think they would want to know, want to support you. I wonder if that’s a possibility?”
I imagined the scene of me telling my parents. My father, whose hair was now a pepper gray and whose face was wrinkled. My mother, whose body sagged and bones ached. I imagined their tears, their pain, the ways in which they would become small and helpless. It felt unbearable. It felt cruel.
“I don’t want to hurt them.” And they wouldn’t understand.
I didn’t look at the tears that night. I just let them fall.
***
The next day, I drew myself on the page as I remembered me to be.
Blue eyes, red hair, dressed in forest green.
I wrote within the outline of my body. I wrote down the dreams I once had, the desires I held secret, the ideas I had conceived of for what I could create in this life. I emptied a box of pencils that I had stashed away in a desk drawer and filled myself in with every color, blending shades across the words.
I dialed a number I knew by heart.
“Hey, sweetie.”
“Mom…” The words disappeared before my mouth closed on the second “m.”
“Annie…what is it?”
“Can you put Dad on the phone, too?” I pinched my nose between two fingers. Crying would only make this worse.
“I’m here, sunshine.” My father’s voice in the background. Gentle, thoughtful, secure.
“I need to tell you both something.”
They listened. Although I couldn’t see them, I thought I could hear their tears in the moments between breathing and speaking. They never doubted what I said, though. They never said if I hurt them. We spoke for over an hour, and they never once told me they were anything less than whole.
***
I knew before I looked in the mirror what I would see.
I had felt the change, had allowed the waves to come.
Colors come to us in waves.
I followed my hand as it traced over my naked form, touching from my chin, my chest, my belly button, moving slowly across the lower half of my body. I felt for the thump of my beating heart, felt it push against my fingers.
No more gray. No more shadows.
My parents’ words echoed, I love you. I love you. We love you. We believe you. We are here for you.
I stuck the portrait I had drawn on the mirror, right in the center. Every empty space was filled.
The world felt fragile, but it was changing and moving. Kaleidoscopic.
Reflecting light and full of color.