The colours left the world. They left like figures in a painting in the long glare of the tropical sun. The sun pours light on a world without light, investing objects with form. How odd that it should also drain objects of colour, like chlorophyll from Autumn’s yellowing leaves.
The higher colours left first: the unappreciated violet, the misunderstood indigo, the neglected green, the polar blue, the ambiguous pink. Red seeped away ages ago with all that chaos. We lost orange in our solitudes.
The colours have mostly gone, but we are still here. Outlines in a fugitive world. We wander like drawings in a world of vanished chlorophyll.
Slowly all things concrete fade to insubstantiality. All that remain are lines. Where once there was architecture, now there is only the hint of their original drawings.
When the world fades, so do we. When we fade, so does the world. We are fading into a dispassionate universal gold, the sunlight behind the glory of substantial things.
How odd to fade from light to quiet light. We retreat into it as into a reverse twilight, where everything is back to front. It seems the back is where things are more real. Luminous like a symphony from an unsuspected realm.
A sutra in light.