The Names We Give Nameless Things Hannah Ahn
I couldn't speak until I was five, when my blind grandfather taught me the
word for 'blue,' the
color he said people never agreed on when they described it to him. The
color of the sky, but what was the sky to a man who couldn't feel the stars
watching him fall asleep? Others offered a cold night, a swimming pool, but
he confessed he thought it was how he felt when he fell off the roof as a
boy: the sudden plummet, the taste of soul leaping from skin. When he died
I didn't want to wear a dress, I wanted to watch the news, drink in a dark
room, and learn how to play an instrument. I thought I should've asked him
about other colors, other ways of seeing things without eyes. Years later I
met an emergency nurse in the city that my brother lived and died in, and
told her what my grandfather told me, asked if it was possible to get used
to witnessing souls leave bodies, said I'd never been afraid of death, not
even the time I
saw a stranger's car wind itself around a telephone pole,
or
when I heard a classmate's cousin had been shot standing in line at the
bank. I said he'd been right, that the color
blue was of fear and nothing more. The nature of surviving, she said, this
stranger, this woman who knew nothing of me, is knowing that you are not
brave.
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