One Tuesday, I found her sitting in the dark living room, blinds drawn. Not crying. Just absorbing . The shadows from the streetlight outside crawled up her arms like vines. I turned on the lamp.
I started noticing the clothes. All black. Not mourning black, but erasure black. The purple blouse I loved? Gone. The floral dress she wore to my graduation? Buried in a trash bag on the curb. She said color "screamed." She preferred the quiet of ash.
I sat next to her in the dark. I took her cold hand—once the color of sand, now the color of slate. Watching My Mom Go Black
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.
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. One Tuesday, I found her sitting in the
“Don’t,” she whispered. Her voice was gravel. “The light hurts.”
She used to be yellow—the good kind. The yellow of lemon zest, of morning eggs, of the sun through the kitchen blinds as she hummed Stevie Wonder off-key. Her hands were the color of warm sand then, always moving, braiding my hair or tapping the counter to a rhythm only she could hear. The shadows from the streetlight outside crawled up
Then it sank. And she went black again.
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.
“I’m still here, Mom,” I said.
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.