Adrift in color

Adrift in Color

Thomas Nazzaro

First comes the blue. A cool, stagnant blue that you sink in to until it submerses you; pulling slowly down all around as everything else is numbed and quieted.  Soon there is only the blue, soaking in to you, chilling your senses and drowning you in the blanket of its heaviness. Then, bleeding out of this blue comes a swirling, sour purple, which pushes away the blue and whisks you around until you lose all sense of direction and become overwhelmed by the sour, vibrant flow. Suddenly, you feel yourself being pressed into a mass; a grainy but solid clump of a silt-like substance that crumbles away as you push against it. Though it crumbles into dust and scrapes against your skin, you grasp at this mass, which is the only substantial thing around you, and pull yourself up out of the swirling purple to fall on to the warm, sun-baked mass to which you had earlier clung. It is a deep, golden brown that reflects light into your eyes and makes you squint. You turn away and see all around you the splashing, churning ocean of the purple within the blue. The purple evaporates from the surface of the water in clouds that smell like fermented sugar, akin to the liquid flow you were tossed about in. You think you can hear the sounds of others like you, tossed and turned as they splash and struggle in the blue and purple. You have found an island of stability, but who is to say whether the others will do the same?