Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

That night in our tent, Justin told me how, ten thousand years ago, human beings were migrant—we were like the birds. The average human would see only about a hundred people in her lifetime and would know each one profoundly, deeply bonded. Today, humans in cities will see a hundred beings in just minutes, naming them strangers, a dehumanizing designation.

“No that’s silly. We see the color of the walls, the same.” “There is no way to prove that your blue is my blue,” he said.

I thought about how an admission of uncertainty is so often, in our culture, seen as weakness. Yet it is only when a mind admits I do not know that it becomes open to unseen possibility, and honest inquiry.

Marrying at twenty is somehow different than marrying at thirty or forty; it’s an innocent leap, a lapse that is lifelong—vowing to give up everything you knew you never had, ’til death.

Because—as I’d discovered—loneliness is not a function of company, but rather it is a consequence: an unpleasant symptom of a needy state of mind that desperately seeks to extract happiness from a source outside itself.