I was eleven years old when I learned that there were colors the human eye couldn’t see. This fact was revealed to me through the discovery of mantis shrimp, a tiny crustacean who lives at the bottom of the ocean and possesses thirteen color cones (as compared to a human’s three), allowing it to see billions of hues incomprehensible to the human mind. I became obsessed. What do these colors look like, and how can I understand them? 

I have spent my life asking questions, starting at the age of five when I constructed a roly poly terrarium to figure out how such tiny insects could dig burrows with no hands. But the idea that there are innumerable facets to the world that I’m unable to see has plagued me for years. 

First of all, what in the world would it be like to stare into the open ocean with thirteen color cones? To a mantis shrimp, the blue ocean must be rippling with whirlwinds of color that none of us will ever be able to imagine. 

This first question prompts a second, and then a third: How else does the world and its complexities exist beyond our understanding? What things have I accepted about reality simply because they were introduced to me as facts, induced by my limited experience? 

The idea that there are layered realities to the world which I cannot understand has now captured my every spare thought for seven years. Thankfully though, I’m not alone in my search for unraveling the mysteries of the status quo. I find solace most often in talking things out with other interested people; staying after class with teachers and classmates to discuss important matters like why hexagons are objectively the best shape. But being an only child means I get a lot of time alone, and in moments like that, I find myself turning to books. 

Ursula K. LeGuinn taught me about different kinds of love, which span across gender, life, and death. Oscar Wilde taught me about the corrosiveness that external beauty can inflict on an unclean heart. Michelle Zauner taught me to relish the good and bad things in every relationship, because you can never be sure when they will be over. Aldous Huxley taught me the value of pain by demonstrating an increasingly prevalent world which has none of it. Fyodor Dostoyevsky taught me over one thousand-one-hundred-sixty-eight pages the value of concision in writing. And Shannon Messenger, author of my favorite book series, Keeper of the Lost Cities, taught me that the world is not always as it appears. 

Inspired by these authors and time alone, I found myself increasingly interested in exploring how simple changes to our environment or biology could lead to a totally different world. Over quarantine, with nothing but time on my hands, I began creating my own sci-fi world, an imaginary landscape where I could push the limits of our physical world and change the metrics of reality at will. 

With every problem I saw around me, I would attempt to create a new planet that would fix it. But what I found at the end of each thought experiment was that no world, no matter how perfectly designed, adequately answers every question of existence. 

And that’s okay. Our world is messy, incoherent, unresolved, thrilling, wonderful, surprising, beautiful, and brimming with uncertainty. It’s easy to despair over the problems we have created, but, in a weird way, I’m grateful that we are imperfect. If everything were seamlessly accounted for, then there would be no place for curious people like me.

So I’m glad there are colors I’ll never be able to see– things that I can’t understand, that downright don’t make sense. Because the mystery of what lies beyond our reach fuels my desire to learn, to grow, to imagine, and to be a citizen of this world.