Darkness

The year is 2083. The War of Spectrum is over. The Officers won. Officers defeated it. Everything changed. The wavelengths of light don´t separate anymore. There was something once called ¨color¨. This is a old uncomfortable word. Like the words in the forbidden books, the dictionaries. There is no record of this ¨color¨. It did not leave a trace to follow. A secret, preserved in the past. But I shall not question it. Things are the way they are for a reason. Everything is for my own good. I am being protected.

This is what I am told by my Giver.

At 24:28-6578, I was born. I had different skin. Unnatural defects. That’s what the Officers say. A word Givers don´t name. It is forbidden and unspoken, I will never know. Now I am like the rest. All other Givers and Childs are unpigmented. They hold me down, they tear me apart, inject me, just because I am different.

I am Aurora.

Different

This word sits on a page in my journal. In my scrawl, a direct defiance of the Officers. Journals are dirty and secretive and illegal. My world is a place of understanding. Inner thoughts are shared. Nothing is secret.

I do not know why this word different is bad. But different is not a characteristic my Giver and the Officers recognizes as good. To society it is a slur. A term unspoken of. And yet it is still there.

Color

My condition is hid from no one. I am labeled. Tagged. Different.

Aurora. It is a shameful title. I am told Aurora is a natural occurrence of ¨color¨. Which I am and others are not.

As a young Child I had gazed into forbidden books. My Giver was a writer, when writing was legal. I am taught that the book of words does not lie. It carries the past, present, and future inside its ragged but silky cover. The dictionary tells me the Officers are wrong: Aurora -a natural electrical phenomenon characterized by the appearance of streamers of reddish or greenish light in the sky, usually near the northern or southern magnetic pole.

This phrase sticks with me. It sounds beautiful, like a name not an insult. The foreign words roll off my tongue as I speak them quietly into my head. I do not know what they mean, but I feel they are important.