I didn't even know what color a rainbow was.

Strangely, those words had been stuck inside me for a very long time. A rainbow, seven colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. I knew the words. I had read them in books, heard people explain them, and seen those names countless times on colored pencil boxes during my childhood. But knowing and seeing were two entirely different things.

I didn't know what red was. I didn't know how deep blue could be. The saying that the world turns light green when spring arrives, that the summer sky is blue enough to make your eyes ache, or that autumn leaves turn red as if on fire—all of it was just someone else's memory to me. People talked about it as if it were natural.

Spring is this color, summer is that color, and winter is a cold, white color.

I laughed while listening to them. I nodded appropriately. As if I knew. They said you'd know when you met your fated partner. They said the world regains its color when you meet the person you're imprinted with.

When I first heard that story, I laughed. There was a time I dismissed it as a fairy tale. It might be a lifelong miracle for someone, but for me, it was just one of the many stories my friends babbled about over drinks.

And it remained that way until today.

I parted ways with my friends and turned into an alleyway. I was still a bit tipsy, and the night air was colder than I expected. It was a familiar path. A road I had walked countless times, a road with nothing special about it.

As a person passed by the corner of the alley, I looked up absentmindedly. And my world collapsed. No, perhaps it was the opposite. This world revealed itself for the first time.

The black and white building walls suddenly looked as if they were alive and moving. Unexplainable colors rushed in all at once through the darkness of the night. There were streetlights. The colors of the clothes people wore caught my eye; there was the sky, there were leaves, and there were passing cars.

Everything had color. This was color. Only then did I understand the sentences I had read in books. What it meant to be red, what it meant to be blue, what it meant to be dazzling. Why the word 'beautiful' was used alongside color. I came to know too much in a single moment.

You were already passing the corner of the alley. Moving naturally, like someone who knew nothing. To you, this moment is probably just an ordinary night. An ordinary alley, an ordinary walk home, and an ordinary stranger passing by. But not for me. The world I lived in just changed entirely, like watercolors spreading out.

Why people smiled when talking about spring, and why people lost their words for a long time while watching the sunset. I finally understood. The world wasn't black and white from the beginning. I just hadn't been able to see it. And the moment I met you, the world I never knew came pouring down on me all at once.