“Red” Haiku Prompt
A blind man asked me,
“What does red look like to you?”
“Insecure,” I said.
Before the popularity of r/AskReddit, Yahoo! Answers was the place to be for thought-provoking questions, answers, and troll comments.
In my youth, I came across the headline:
“The Most Difficult Question That Cannot Be Answered: How Would You Describe the Color Red to a Blind Man?”
I remember reading a bunch of different answers, but none that really answered the question.
Because in short, it is a very difficult question to answer when you include the element of sight in the equation.
But why should the sense of sight take such precedence when talking about colors?
Colors, like every other beautiful aspect of the world, have little to do with how they look.
It’s all about, in my opinion, how they make you feel.
A red painting, for instance, can have a very different impact on various kinds of people. Some may feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. And others might feel one of many different kinds of emotions, feelings, and memory triggers.
Masked by anger, frustration, love, passion, and even violence, red, to me, is a color of insecurity; a profound sense of shame, low self-esteem, and guilt that snowballs into more extreme forms of emotions, if left unchecked.
I suppose that’s why red blends so well with happier colors like yellow and orange because it desperately wants to achieve such a blissful state as well.
-Tally🦋
