Van Gogh stands on a ladder and paints the sky blue, with his blood—his brown eyes reflecting the yellow sun. Still in his shorts, he is a little boy who doesn’t know what lightning and clouds are. May he live a thousand years—the silver moon wishes. May he continue to breathe yellow in the hearts of people, even when weepy storms blank their eyes. May he never fall from the ladder, may the ladder never fall—the entire world wishes.

It is not merely hope. It is a yearning for childhood—something one should never lose. For we all were children once and stood on a ladder trying to learn the colors of the sky. ‘Paint the blue sky blue’—we wish to do that again, don’t we?—and collect amber pebbles from beige earth and put them in gray pots. We want to rhyme with the world and make it colorful—green a little green, blue a little blue and yellow a little yellow.

He stands on his ladder, the melody of birds going into his ears—one of which he’ll chop off when he grows up. He thinks aloud to the world… unaware (is he?) that the world will hear his words even four hundred years after he stops breathing, because it listens more to the dead than the living. He just puts his thoughts out as if I am not here with him, listening to every word he says.

He starts in medias res, “Back then, the sky was blue. Today the only thing blue is despair. Why?” Then pauses. And continues, “Can you hold the ladder from the bottom so I can walk up and start putting a few white clouds in the sky and then paint it blue? Can you give me my paint brushes back? The ones I had painted the ‘starry night’ with? Do I even know how to hold a brush?”

But no one listens. Everyone is busy with their screens—clicking on the LIKE buttons under the HD images of his paintings (and my poems), sitting in their closed fancy rooms, using technology that erases yellow from earth and replaces it with black. Black, black everywhere. Black of machines.

The black of machines differs from the black of night—he says.

And since—he knows—I’m a poet and love nights as much as the idea of fate, he also says, “In ancient Greece, they said, Fate is the daughter of Night. Was. For today, it is not so. Today, fate has divorced her mother. Today ‘starry nights’ don’t have a fate because the black of machines has taken over them.

Once the night was starry. We were lazying in my balcony and I was sitting on a plush teal couch. I like teal, even though blue has been after me for centuries. ‘A slash of blue’ teal is. A fragment. I was in a blue pair of socks then, hidden by my pants. And scratching on a notepad bordered with blue flowers. Hidden because if he knew about my socks, he would have said that blue symbolized my pain.

Blue symbolized pain, white peace, yellow happiness, and black represented death for him. Not the death I liked, though. The kind I abhor—the death of earth and colors. He was passionate about colors and emotions they represented. Colors were everything for him. Just as death is everything for me.

I was smiling when I told him about my nightmares; not everything, though. I didn’t expect him to understand how ‘pain has an element of blank’ because of his passion of filling blankness with yellow—the symbol of happiness. But he said something I hadn’t expected. “Nights are more precious than yellow meadows,” he said. “And late-night trinkets called stars decide everything. Like yellow.”

Every night I wear jewelry made with trinkets of seawater. I touch them with my tongue, remove dirt off them by swallowing it all inside. And wait—for Moira to accept me as her sister. For I am the child of her mother—Nyx. But she won’t let me. Moira, my sister, wants Nyx only for herself. She doesn’t understand how I was never with her in life because ‘I could not stop for death.’

The sky is not so blue, presently. There are gray clouds aloft—smoke from factories or vapor of clouds, we don’t know. He is on a ladder—which I hold with my hands lest he should fall. I ask him, “You love the night so much, and yet, you don’t like the world getting black. How so?”

“Because nights have a light more luminescent than the black of the day—the black of smoke and filth, broken hearts, molten glaciers and hyper-world of internet,” he says. And then I ask him, “What is so special about colors that we talk more about them than emotions?”

He does not reply. He looks down from his ladder—now as old as he would’ve been if he had survived to this day—and says he’s busy, with a trace of mock anger in his voice. “Go walk forever in the yellow meadows of your words, while I use my blue,” he says.

Yes, he yearns for blue now. Yellow was important then. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was necessary when the world was not so black, so dead, and the sky bluer, the night darker. But today, as he looks at it, standing atop his blue ladder, by the side of a yellow wall which touches the gray clouds and goes a little beyond, he finds nothing but black. Why? He doesn’t ask. He knows he won’t have an answer. 

So he picks up his brush and starts painting blue. While I write yellow on my notepad: “Nature rarer uses yellow…”

– Emily Dickinson