If I were blind I would go to Istanbul and take a taxi to a rug merchant.
Inside the store I would run my fingers up the rounded folds of each carpet.
The bristly points and silky piles of knotted or woven floor art would flash color into my “sightless” life.
I would lean on rich red columns with my cheek and scuffle over smokey purples in my bare feet. Fragrances of tumeric, wine and earth trodden by sheep would rise from my rainbow palette.
Colors would enter my psyche through my skin and I would dream in waves of fiber, a different texture for every somnumbulary lull. Threads, woven and knotted by those who absorb color differently from me, would excite my perceptions to the point of new learning. I would find myself differentiating yellow from turquoise. I might even poke at people’s categories. I might tell them that red is not necessarily a warm color.
My unseeing eyes, empty of complaint and expectation, would fill with tears of too-muchness. I would nuzzle a plushness that spoke of spices escaping the hànds of the creator as skin scraped skein after skein. I would dare to lecture non-blind people on the sound made by cerulean blue as it subsides onto a cement floor.
That’s how I would travel in a bright world with the imprint of warm tassels in my palm and
savoring the swell of my heart in the colors of carpets.
