We named the light because we always feared the dark.
I don’t really remember the first time I noticed it, but I was probably eight or nine; all curious, reading and learning about everything except the academic syllabus being taught at the school I was enrolled in.
I’ve just discovered about the Schrödinger truth, that nothing really happens until we see it. It is the observer that makes the difference, not the phenomenon itself! It was never the event, but the eye upon it, that brought it to life, to the world.
It was about time I realised that I’d accidentally stumbled upon something that was just too much for me at that point. You know, something sudden but so silent, the kind of realisation that doesn’t shock you, but slowly, quietly dismantles everything you once believed in.
They tell us that the colour blue doesn’t occur in nature. They say it isn’t a colour; it’s a trick, an illusion of light scattering. The Greeks never saw it. Ancient Indians referred to the sky as “smoke-coloured.” Perhaps they were never blind; maybe they just didn’t lie to themselves.
The day I found out, something inside me flickered. If “blue” is a mass hallucination, then what else is? The warmth of words? The memory of someone’s face? How much of what I see is real, and how much is something my mind conjured up just to stay alive?
Perhaps the sky was never really blue. Perhaps I needed it to be.
Maybe every colour is a confession.
And then of course, I started seeing it everywhere, what if the leaves aren’t green? The way blood turns black when it dries up, the way the colour “white” actually never exists, we just call it white because we do not see anything. These colours; they are nothing but mere layers of some sort of exhaustion pretending to be true.
All that I ever believed was colour, was merely light that pretended to mean something. The universe doesn’t paint the objects that it holds, but it lies. And we, with our weak mortal eyes and requirement for order, continue to label the deception beautiful.
I stood once on my balcony and saw the evening unravel, you know, the birds flying back to their homes, the sun setting. Everything seemed as usual, perfectly fine, but then I noticed the blue seeped out of the world as if it were dying. For a brief moment, everything seemed so real raw, uncoloured, terrifying. And I understood that beauty is a bruise we continue to press because pain is the only evidence that we’re alive.
Truth doesn’t hide. We do.
Science calls it Rayleigh scattering. Philosophy calls it illusion. Religion calls it Maya. But the fact is that they all are referring to the same one thing; that what we are seeing is not a part of the real world, it’s just something our mind is rearranging stuff to make all of this chaos look bearable to our human eye and brain.
Sometimes I wonder, that He is sitting up there, or maybe in some dimension we could never comprehend, watching us creating our own little happiness, own little deceptions, naming the thing He never even intended to create. Maybe He never spoke because He knew, that if we ever heard the truth (unfiltered), we’d go berserk.
Maybe the sky appears to be blue because we are not ready to see what it actually looks like.
The world ends not in darkness, but in clarity.
I look up at the sky now and I do not perceive colour anymore; I perceive distance: cold and infinite. I perceive light gasping out across time, posing as something, something we cannot understand fully as of now. I perceive a God who never cared to complete what he had begun.
And I believe perhaps He did not forget. Perhaps He left the sky unpainted so that we would forever feel that hollow, hollowness when we gaze up; the cruel reminder that beauty was never reality, but merely a sort of comfort.
The older I become, the more I understand that all the things that are real, are hidden in ways we cannot comprehend, we cannot explain.
The sky was never blue. It was a mirror. And each time I look at it, I see all the things we’ve created to keep from looking at ourselves.
Discover more stories on Her Campus at MUJ. More articles by me coming soon at Vaibhav Chaudhary at HCMUJ; he who watches the world and its miracles closely, noticing what slips between moments, between the infinite realities.