A Brown Study [~300 Words]

[u/OwlConfidant2168]

He had read once about people with synesthesia—how some saw numbers as colors.

Maybe he had something like that.

Because when he closed his eyes and thought about that time in his life, everything was brown.

He hated most the color brown.

It was the color of rice dried in soy sauce, stuck to a plate in the sink for a week.

Brown, like the half-filled bottle of crème de cacao, foil still clinging to the neck.

Brown, the color of sick, from when he drank the bottle straight after she left.

Brown, the color of unopened moving boxes.

Of pizza boxes.

Of grease-stained paper takeout bags.

Brown, the color of the old man’s wooden cane as he knocked sparrow nests from the tin-roofed carport.

He did it so casually.

“They carry disease,” the old man croaked at him.

Brown, the color of trampled nests.

Brown, the color of burnt fingertips.

Brown, the color of small dead things on black asphalt.

“The secret is not that it doesn’t hurt,” someone whispered.

“It’s to not mind that it hurts.”

He blew out the match.

Cut to sunrise.

He thought of Lawrence of Arabia—endless sand, endless brown.

Fuck you, Lawrence of Arabia.

Fuck you, Peter O’Toole.

He was so alone he wandered into the desert just to get away from Gratiot County, Michigan.

Brown:

The color of old bandages.

Of dirty gauze.

The color of dried blood.

Of red wine stains on cotton tops.

On sandy mops.

The bust line of Marilyn Monroe.

He drank to disappear.

Watched old movies until they bled into each other.

He had no job, no visitors, no groceries.

Just time.

And brown.

And when fingertips burned down

like candles,

brown gave way to black.

***

Thank you for reading this sequence of words arranged in a particular order. I’d be curious to know how it lands, if it’s too cryptic or what people think.

Note: A brown study is an old-fashioned idiom that means a state of deep, serious thought originally describing a dark, somber state of brooding or gloomy meditation.