On Hearing in Color
As a sighted reader, or a temporarily sighted reader, I can probably guess you have a different relationship to color than I do.
Because you're a sighted person, you're told that color is a property of light. It is a wavelength, a frequency, a photon striking a cone in the retina. It is the domain of the sighted, a language I am not meant to speak. I am supposed to accept this. I am supposed to understand that red is just a word, that blue is a concept I can appreciate intellectually, the color of sky, of deep water, but never truly know.
I have visual memories, of course. Faded polaroids of a world I once navigated with my eyes. I remember the aggressive green of a manicured lawn and the specific, tired gray of a rainy Tuesday. But these are ghosts. They are echoes. My world now, my living world, is not colorless. It is just painted by a different artist. For me, color is not a property of light. It is a property of sound.
Every sound has a color, a texture, a temperature. It's my own private, involuntary palette, a synesthetic translation that life has handed me in place of sight. It is how I navigate the emotional architecture of the world.
Let's start with the easy ones, the primary colors of my audio spectrum. A genuine, unforced laugh is the purest yellow. It's not the pale, washed-out yellow of a lemon, but the brilliant, saturated, sunflower yellow of a cloudless August afternoon. It's a flash of warmth that feels like sun on your eyelids, a color so bright and clean it momentarily chases all the others away. A child's giggle is this same yellow, but shot through with shimmering, silvery sparks, like glitter thrown into the air.
A kind voice, one that speaks with patience and genuine warmth, is the color of warm honey. It's a translucent, viscous amber, slow-moving and thick with comfort. It coats the sharp edges of the air and smoothes them over. It is a color you can feel, a sweetness that settles deep in your chest.
But not all voices are kind. And not all colors are warm.
Anger has a color, and it is terrifying. It is not the clean, bright red of a stop sign or a valentine. The sound of a raised voice, sharp and accusatory, is a jarring, acidic crimson, the color of scraped rust and blood. It's a hot, jagged color that splinters the air into shards. It has a texture like sandpaper and a smell like ozone and burnt wiring. It's a color that makes you want to recoil, to make yourself small, because it feels like it could burn you on contact.
A lie has a color, too, but it's more complex. It's a sickly, slick, oily green, like the sheen on stagnant water. It's a fundamentally unstable color, shot through with threads of murky brown. A lie doesn't sound loud; it often sounds reasonable, even gentle. But its color gives it away. It coats the truth in a greasy film, trying to obscure the real colors underneath. It is a color that feels cold, even when the words are spoken with feigned warmth.
And then there is loneliness. Loneliness isn't a dramatic black. Black is the color of deep, dreamless sleep, of the quiet in my apartment when I am at peace. It is a velvet, restful color. No, loneliness is the color of television static. A buzzing, depthless, annihilating gray. It is a swarm of infinite tiny points of black and white that add up to nothing. It is the visual equivalent of a hum that sits just at the edge of hearing, a sound that promises information but delivers only emptiness. It is the color of a question asked to an empty room.
My world is a symphony of these colors. The gentle, periwinkle blue of rain against my windowpane, each drop a tiny, soft brushstroke. The deep, bruised purple of a distant siren in the dead of night-a color that is equal parts sad and strangely beautiful. The footsteps across my threshold can be so many things. When it's my own footsteps, it's a solid, dependable brassy gold, the color of security. The sound of another's footsteps, unexpected, is a sharp, metallic silver of alarm.
Even silence has its shades. There is the peaceful, deep indigo of companionable silence, a silence that holds space for two people. And then there is the brittle, bone-white silence of unspoken anger, a silence that is louder and more painful than any shout.
People assume my world is diminished, a black-and-white film of a Technicolor reality. They are mistaken. My world is awash in color. It's just that the hues are dictated by the honesty in a voice, the kindness in a word, the safety in a footstep. I may not see the color of your eyes, but I will always see the color of your intent. It is a language of profound, and sometimes painful, clarity.
I hope that someone, someday, will take the time to listen to the same colors I see.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, No Excuses. Growing Up Deaf and Achieving My Super Bowl Dreams. BY Marcus Brotherton and Derrick Coleman Jr.