Crying in Technicolor, living in Black and White.

What color is depression? There is a disorder called synethsesia wherein events or thoughts or emotions or days of the week evoke themselves as colors in the perceptor's minds.

I often find myself longing to be afflicted with such a disorder. I think that it would be the height of coolness to have this "problem." Thinking in technicolor. Emotions and sound being perceived as purple or gray or orange or green or magenta or puce.

How totally awesome.

And yet, what color is depression? What color would be the sense of a broken valve within the steam plant, a crossed wire in the cortex, a missing spark plug in the engine that is my brain?

A swirling, angry black and red motif, I'm thinking. But no, depression isn't gray. It isn't black. It's a sort of gangrenous green, a sick olive split-pea-soup sort of melange, some sticky puss-laden excrement that stains your best white shirt just before the bar mitzvah.

Depression isn't angry, it isn't sad, it isn't intense or colorful or proud or anything. Depression is an antithesis. It's a singularly inauspicious anything.

Depression is the color of ice left too long in the freezer. Depression is the color of socks worn through a thick, clinging mud, which, once washed, are never truly completely white again.

Depression is the sense of humid oppressiveness that fills your lungs when you step off the airplane in New Orleans in August. It fills the nooks and crannies and crevices of your lungs with a thick, heavy paste, weighing you down like your arteries were filled with a slurry of molten lead and oatmeal.

Life becomes monochrome, or sepia tone. Washed out like the eerie sort of blackish gray and white just after the sunset, but before night has really taken hold. Not one, not the other, and really, not much of anything else in between.

What color is my life right now? What synethsetic sort of kaleidescope typifies my existence from day to day?

Stick your head into a basin of wash water, after you've rinsed out your dirtiest gym socks and filthiest welcome mat, washed the dog and scrubbed clean the grease trap underneath the stove.

Now open your eyes. The color you see? That blurry, gray, stinging sort of glacial silt?

That's my life. Isn't it grand?