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Waking up is still an odd experience. I still don’t dream with my new perception, so it’s like reentering the world that I’m now in every day. Or at least for now. What has it been, five days? Soon the only thing that reminds me of the world I used to live in will be looking at screens, because screens aren’t made for eyes like my own.
Recently I underwent my most recent anatomical modification. New eyes. They’re blue (my last eyes were brown) but that isn’t the important part. These new eyes have color receptors most humans lack. The average person has three color receptors, less then that if you’re colorblind. These new eyes have seven. It’s hard to describe how the world changes other just the fact that it is so unimaginably more vivid. There aren’t names for these colors yet, so few people have underwent the changes that I did, perhaps I could give them new names, even then it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me, and I can know them all very well. Perhaps if I meet another person like me it’ll be different and we’ll make up all the words that we need; though then again, I don’t think anyone else has the exact same new cones that I do, there’s many directions one can expand their eyeballs into if they’d like.
There’s so many things that look different now. Sunsets across the Hudson, the flare of the fiery sun showing something that isn’t quite red, while the river reflects something that used to be a mere silver but that’s now some unexpected shimmering thing. But its even beyond that, the alleyways are filled with colors that have no names just as well, the necks of pigeons and once grey rain reflecting things equally as unique. The colors I once knew as part of nature I now see to be part of humanity’s perception of nature alone, while nature itself shines with almost eldritch things, things that it feels like humanity was never meant to know, but that somehow I know. It’s like I’m cheating, transcending the petty perception meant merely for apes to hunt with, and gaining organs truly meant only for the perception of beauty, and no cause more base or more practical. If only they made paints in the colors that I now can know the light of.
The best part about having unique eyes is the things that you see, the worst part about having unique eyes is it completely separates you from the rest of your species in a way that can never really be fixed. I am in a world filled with beautiful things that cannot be shared with anyone. Every light of the sky, or radiant flower, or hundred colored rainbow, or reflection off the edge of apartment windows, is something I want to describe to people, to get them to look at, to tell them that its beautiful, and now I just can’t.
I wish so badly to just take a picture of these things. To just take out my phone and capture it like I once could all things. Yet I know all it will every be is the awkward reflection of nothing, in dull colors that look like how the world once did to me, showing me only what the world would still be if I still had weaker body parts. All it would be is a reminder of what can now only be captured by my memory. I could paint these things, but they don’t sell the paints in the colors I see. If I wanted to built it out of pixels I’d need a new type of computer, the very screens we have know only green red and blue, like my old eyes did.
You cannot imagine a new color, which means you cannot explain a color to someone who hasn’t seen it. Every other experience is describable to some extent, someone who uses anatomical modification to make themself stronger, or more beautiful, or even give themself any other sort of new function, can at least explain their experiences. The best I have are generic words like beautiful, but there are no words for what I’ve seen. I know it is not madness, yet it feels like madness, it feels like madness because its this world that exists on in my mind. What other word for it is.
It’s funny, as a child I thought maybe if people saw colors differently, like if one person’s red wasn’t another person’s red, there’d be no way to know. But now I know. I know because we would weep for it if such things were the case, it would be a wound that our species would never heal from. Never truly fully be whole.
I was talking to Jammie about this the other day, and he (or maybe she, she’s changed sex recently but doesn’t really seem to like it, so now he’s just some sort of goth femboy thing with long hair that looks like a girl failing to be a boy) didn’t seem to understand what I had to deal with at all. We were sitting in that café over on Lexington, the one where you have a good view of those towering brownstones with all their little gargoyles and etchings.
Jammie asked me; “So, what is it that you’re seeing right now that’s different from what I would see?”
And I tried to explain; “There’s no difference that I could tell you that you’d understand. Most things that weren’t colored in by humans are a different color but they aren’t colors that you’d know, they’re colors that you don’t have words for and even if you did you’d have no way of imagining them if you’d never seen them yourself.”
And then he put his little phone in my face, showing me a picture of what I think was sunset part, with that view of the skyline and everything, and asked me; “What does this look like to you?”
I answered, I guess I was probably uninterested, but I answered, “It looks the exact same as it does for you because that’s the way that the phone was designed. The company isn’t going to sell something for my eyes is it?”
Jammie told me wearily, “I suppose not.”
“As I said, anything not colored in by humans looks like a different color to me.”
“Ok, what about the sky! What color is the sky right now to you?”
I looked up at the sky, peering out past the labyrinth of buildings, leafless winter trees flanking them. “The sky has a lot of interesting colors to me, yes, but I suppose on a day like this it would be grey to someone like you. Grey to most people that is.”
“What does it look like though?”
“It looks like clouds… I suppose the light shining through the clouds is more vivid, while where they’re thicker is closer to how you’d see them, though still less grey then they must be to you.”
“You describe everything with how I’d see it.”
“Well, I suppose I know how you’d see it, and that’s important in something’s description.”
“I know how I see things.”
“I know how you see things. People need reassurance I know how they see things. People are very comfortable with someone seeing things a different way, it’s when they don’t seem to understand how most people see things that makes them all upset.”
“I won’t. I’ll be ok with however you tell me you see things.”
“Well, at least I can say that they sky is very pretty to me today, and not grey, not sure how many other details I could translate for you without you having the same anatomical changes as I do.”
“I’m happy that the sky is pretty to you.” It was an almost naïve sounding comment, Jammie is the same age as me though I always fear there’s something childlike about her, or perhaps that there’s something dangerously mature about me, even in my twenties something jaded has happened to me. Meanwhile Jammie just seems pure.
There’s a butterfly on my desk. It’s a beautiful little artifact, a creature that was once alive that is now preserved forever in glass, a little moment that isn’t anymore. There used to be a time when such creatures were preserved for the sake of keeping their memory alive, in case they went extinct, but its been a few decade since anything has gone extinct, and most things that used to be endangered species aren’t endangered anymore. So I suppose people just put dead butterflies below glass and taxidermy animals because it makes it so you can put them in places where you couldn’t otherwise put them.
Either way there’s a butterfly on my desk, and before my eyes changed everyone agreed that it was a blue butterfly. Such a nice pretty blue, a shimmering blue like how lapis and clear mornings are blue. And when people come to my desk they’ll look at it and say its such a pretty blue, it can match something, it can even match my eyes. I suppose there used to be a time when I would decorate my things with a lot of blues, it was one of my favorite colors when it was one of the only colors that I could see. I think its good to have these little things around you, these things that people can complement, and can enjoy about you when they see you, maybe to know a bit more about what kind of person you would be to have them.
And now that I’ve matured, and my eyes se it as a new color, I still have to call it my blue butterfly. Because if everyone refers to it as blue when they’re talking about it, its easier to just call it the blue butterfly then to cause conflict disputing it with people who will never understand. So even though colors are just in our eyes and our heads, somehow, the butterfly is blue, and it is not the color that I see it as. When talking about it, it is blue, if it comes up in the context of the company I work for, it is blue, if the butterfly would ever come up in a court of law, it would be blue. I have to act like its blue, people would honestly be mad at me if I ever acted like it was something else. So, due to a quirk of the human mind, the butterfly is blue, that is a fact about it, and the fact that I see the butterfly differently doesn’t prove color more complicated, it just gives me the private joy of getting to see color wrong in a way that many consider quite pretty. If I were to talk to anyone about the meaning of the butterfly or how it feels to look like, what can be experienced from seeing those wings, I would have to act as if it was blue, one could say I was merely acknowledging the way they see it, but in practice I’m just confirming cosmic truth in what their eyes do.
I guess it makes me insane in a way. I’ve tried to talk to people as if the way they saw the world was as subjective as mine, but they all got angry, or acted as if I was insane. So I guess that’s what I am, seeing things that don’t match with reality, even though its not anything wrong with my brain. It’s just something that’s in my eyes. It doesn’t effect my ability to do my job, or dominate my life, in any way that makes it too clear that I’m insane, it just creates an effect similar to hallucinations, and like anyone else who has hallucinations, my ability to live within the world of the sane is determined by my ability to understand the world as the sane see it as an objective reality.
I work in costume design, I suppose I thought at one point that my new eyes would help me at my job, even though I logically knew that I would always have to design for people with average three color eyes. I guess I thought it would build a world that would inspire me. But it’s made it harder in so many ways, I must constantly check to see how things would appear to lesser eyes in order to work with them, reminding me that every garment and material is something that looks different to most of the world. And its all the worse because I cannot ask, cannot bridge the fact that something that I look at or hold is different to me then it is to most people without creating all sorts of trouble from people who insist that the way that they see the world is reality.
The butterfly must be blue, they will not merely be satisfied with just seeing it as blue, it has to be blue in some objective sense, with any other perception being some sort of wrongness. And you can have your perception, they do not mind the mere fact that you see the world differently then they ever will, but they mind the thought of that perception as anything other then a disability, a distortion, of the way that they see things. They have constructed their own artificial idea of sanity, and declared anything that won’t lie and say its true to be mad.
