The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

But that night, lying on my mat, I thought of the vuaka, its huge, sad eyes, the glorious streak of gold it had made as it vanished into the dark above us, and felt for a moment a despair so profound that I was momentarily unable to breathe.

There were so many shades and tones of green—serpent, aphid, pear, emerald, sea, grass, jade, spinach, bile, pine, caterpillar, cucumber, steeped tea, raw tea: how inadequate is our vocabulary for color!—that I feared I would lose my ability to distinguish anything else. Fa’a’s loincloth, a bright crimson, burned my eyes, and yet I found myself staring at it as much and for as long as I could bear, as if trying to fix its redness in my mind before it too began to be interpreted by my eye as yet another shade of green. At night I dreamed of green, great floating blobs of it, morphing gently from one shade to the next, and in the mornings I woke feeling beaten and exhausted.