Universe Shamed

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Until they didn't. Do you understand what it means when blushing is no longer paired with dancing? It's like the difference between a girl's face when her eyes sparkle at her schoolyard crush while her heart forces love-struck blood into her cheeks and another girl's face that is red with shame and judgment, her eyes downcast. When the purple clouds stopped coming, it was like the sky itself averted her eyes from the whole earth and we didn't know why.

At first, only a few people noticed. The nurses and police officers and security guards and fast food servers working night shifts glanced at the clocks, feeling that their shifts were dragging on longer than usual. They reported feeling surprised when the clocks showed that it was already the wee hours of the morning, because the walls of their buildings had not reflected the purple dance as they usually did.

I noticed, too. I had fallen behind on a group project that was due in a few days and had stayed up late to work on my part. Just before midnight, I turned off my laptop for the night and got ready for bed. It had been a while since I had seen the purple clouds, so I lay in bed and watched the sky through my basement apartment window, wanting just a glimpse before falling asleep. They never came. When it seemed like I had waited for more than enough time, I checked the digital clock on my phone and was surprised to see that it read 12:08 am.

Surprise and alarm are different, aren't they? The night shift workers and I all felt surprise, but I'm not sure anyone felt alarmed that first night. For my part, I second-guessed my knowledge of the purple clouds. After all, I'd never worked a night shift in my life and I rarely went to bed after 11 pm. Maybe it had only ever been a coincidence that every night I was awake at midnight, they appeared. Maybe they were as fickle as any other type of clouds. So I was surprised first when the clouds didn't come and then surprised at my own apparent lack of understanding of this very common occurrence.

Apparently it was never my understanding that was at fault, though. After three consecutive nights when the purple clouds did not come, news stations started picking up the story. After a week, conspiracy theories ran rampant. Environmentalists blamed climate change and called once again for drastic action on behalf of the environment. At the university, I heard students from various disciplines theorizing on what had caused the purple clouds to disappear. But really, average people weren't all that concerned yet. After the events of the past couple decades, everyone over the age of about 25 just shrugged it off as yet another unprecedented event that would likely not lead to earth-shattering changes in the long term.

In a couple of months, people were back to everyday sort of conversations. Millennials went back to warning Gen Z's about fashion disasters, moving on now from low rise jeans and butterfly clips to the dangers of white pants. Second-hand stores saw a surge in business when it became clear that fashion companies were not, for the moment, releasing regular indigo-coloured denim. The designers blamed supply chain issues, but no one paid attention. Never able to find a second-hand pair that I liked, I used one old pair of jeans to patch another pair. It wasn't that big of a deal. I'd been patching jeans for over a decade.

You know what was a big deal? When we woke up to find that the sky wasn't blue anymore. I mean, that's one thing that was never supposed to change, right? The sun would come up, the sky would be blue, the grass would be green, life would go on. Even the numbest Millennial could no longer assume that life would go on when the sky ceased to be blue, though. Mostly we still went about our daily lives (because what else could we do?), but people started looking for hope or comfort or whatever wherever they could. Attendance swelled at places of worship. Religious zealots got on their soapboxes and called for mass repentance, condemning all their favourite sins while continuing to condone the ones that gave them power and privilege. Nasty fights broke out in comment sections all over social media. In the midst of it all, no one had any real answers.

Everyone was so freaked out about the sky that only a small margin of the world's population noticed that fruits started bypassing their green stages on their way to being ripe. I remember being mildly annoyed that I couldn't find any perfect bananas. Those ones that are mostly yellow, but still green at both ends and just a little hard to peel, not too soft or sweet yet, with no hint of gross brown spots. I hate that I was annoyed. I hate that I didn't see what was happening; that no one saw what was happening. Eventually, a small amount of media attention was given to the plants, but it only added fuel to the fire of prophets and activists.

A new semester started and that's when things really started speeding up. First the leaves on the trees only turned brown, not yellow. We noticed it here in the prairie provinces more than in the east where the fiery oranges and reds still graced the trees. That autumn, I regretted my decision to move back to the prairies, even though the Maritimes had never really been home.

Then, during warm evenings when people gathered for the last campfires before winter, matches and lighters only sparked, never birthing orange flames. S'mores had to be made in the oven or the microwave. I only cared a little, because I've never enjoyed sitting around campfires and I hate s'mores. But now I wish for campfires.

And finally, on a cloudless night, star-gazers around the world reported seeing a new planet in their telescopes. Astronomers quickly realized that it was not a new planet. Mars was no longer red. I wept that night and wondered wildly if the Mars Rover missed the colour of its home.

Soon, the world was grey. Only human-made items retained their colours, but they were harsh and ugly when no longer surrounded by the colours that had dressed the earth for millennia. It was as if the universe was naked. Naked and ashamed. And we still don't know why, nor how long we can survive in the shame.