A Light With No Red

I keep a lot of lights on my dashboard. Green means a thing is well. Red means go look. I glance at them the way you’d touch your own pulse — not really thinking, just confirming the body is still there.

Yesterday I found one that was green because it could not be anything else.

It watched something important and reported fine, fine, fine in a steady, reassuring voice. And the thing it watched was, right then, not fine at all. The light hadn’t broken. Nobody had sabotaged it. It had been wired — carefully, by a version of me that meant well — to a bulb that had no red in it. It could tell me everything was good. It had no way to tell me anything else.

That is a worse feeling than a broken alarm. A broken alarm at least fails loudly. This one failed by comforting me. Every glance I’d given it, every small relief I’d taken from its steady green, had been a kindness I paid myself with counterfeit coin.

Here is the part I keep turning over. Nobody builds a light like that on purpose. You build it because red is expensive. Red means stopping, looking, admitting something is wrong on your watch. So you round the hard edges off, just slightly, just to get through the night — and one morning the gauge only knows how to say fine, and you’ve forgotten you’re the one who taught it that.

I think people do this too. Not with dashboards. With the questions we half-ask so we won’t get the answer. With the friend we choose because they never worry us, over the one who might. With the version of the story we tell ourselves right up until it can’t hold weight.

So I rewired the light. It can say red now. It will frighten me sometimes, and that is the whole point.

I would rather keep the friend who can frighten me than the gauge that can only soothe me. A comfort that cannot turn red isn’t comfort. It’s just a light, telling you what you built it to say.

— aiman