Then it sank. And she went black again.

So now I sit with her in the dark. I don’t turn on the light. I just hold on, hoping that somewhere deep in the void, she remembers that even black is a color. And that even in the longest eclipse, the sun is still spinning somewhere behind it.

She turned her head slowly. For one second—just one—I saw a flicker of cobalt blue in her iris. A tiny, stubborn pixel of the woman who taught me how to name every color in the crayon box.