“Don’t,” she whispered. Her voice was gravel. “The light hurts.”
“I’m still here, Mom,” I said.
I sat next to her in the dark. I took her cold hand—once the color of sand, now the color of slate.
Then her eyes went first. The light in them didn't fade; it retreated . Like an animal backing into a cave. She looked at me, but she looked through me, searching for a little girl who no longer existed.
And I realized: she wasn't becoming a villain. She wasn't becoming evil. She was becoming void . Depression had bleached her of spectrum, leeched every wavelength until only the absence remained.
Then it sank. And she went black again.
So now I sit with her in the dark. I don’t turn on the light. I just hold on, hoping that somewhere deep in the void, she remembers that even black is a color. And that even in the longest eclipse, the sun is still spinning somewhere behind it.
Not a peaceful quiet. The kind that fills a room after a slammed door. She started staring at the TV after the news went off, watching the static snow. I’d catch her in the hallway at 3 a.m., not sleepwalking, just standing , as if she’d forgotten the geography of her own home.
She turned her head slowly. For one second—just one—I saw a flicker of cobalt blue in her iris. A tiny, stubborn pixel of the woman who taught me how to name every color in the crayon box.
It didn’t happen all at once. Not like a blown fuse or a curtain drop. It was more like a slow-developing photograph, but in reverse: the color draining from the edges, then the middle, until only shadows remained.
