Liora and the Shimmer that could not be Held

(Paradox of Qualia & The Explanatory Gap — Luminous Encounter)

Liora entered the meadow just before dawn, when colour was still only thinking about arriving. The air was soft as breath against glass, and the last stars wavered like dew still deciding whether to be light or water. She walked slowly, not wishing to disturb whatever the world was becoming.

At the centre of the meadow sat an unfamiliar glow — not bright, not dim, but intent, as though light itself were pausing in mid-thought. It looked, at first, like a patch of morning mist, except that it shimmered in colours she could feel before she could see — warm like apricot skin, cool like moonlit metal, scented faintly of rain on unfinished dreams.

She approached, and the shimmer quivered, almost shy.

Not like an animal guarding itself —

but like meaning waiting to be construed.

“Hello,” Liora whispered, unsure whether whispering meant anything here.

A voice rose from the shimmer, not spoken, but shaped in her awareness like a taste that had become intention:

"Do not ask what colour I am.

Ask who I am when you look."

Liora blinked.

The shimmer changed.

Not its shape — it had none.

Not its hue — it only ever felt coloured.

But rather, her own world inside her eyes bent slightly, as though it had always assumed that colours were things, like berries, or feathers, or paint —

not relations.

She raised her hand toward it, and instantly it flared into a trembling constellation of impossible tones — flavours of colour — sensations with no names, like velvet poured through bells or mint warming instead of cooling.

She gasped, and it settled back into gentleness.

“You shift when I reach for you,” she said.

"No," replied the shimmer.

"You shift when you reach for me."

Liora sat down, because some truths are easier understood closer to the ground.

“So you’re… colour?”

The shimmer almost laughed — if laughter could take the form of rustling silk.

"Colour is only how you touch me with sight.

Others would touch me differently.

A moth might taste me.

A river might echo me.

Stone might dream me.

You call this the gap.

It is not a gap.

It is the place where we meet."

Liora felt her heart widen, the way it does when a long-held assumption politely steps aside.

“If you are not what I see,” she asked, “then what are you?”

The shimmer dimmed, deep and tender as dusk inside a pearl.

"I am the readiness to become

what your seeing makes possible."

“And when no one is here to see you?”

The shimmer swelled like a slow inhale.

"Then I am pure potential —

not hidden,

not waiting,

not lacking —

simply not yet cut into phenomenon."

Liora closed her eyes.

Behind her eyelids, it bloomed — not as vision, but as first-order experience without name.

She sensed that she was not merely perceiving it —

they were co-actualising a moment neither could make alone.

When she opened her eyes again, the shimmer had already begun dissolving, not dispersing into the air, but withdrawing into possibility.

As it faded, it spoke one final time, gentle as unheard music:

"Do not ask what colours truly are.

Ask what you become in order to see them."

The meadow was grey again.

But Liora was not.

And somewhere, just outside the boundary where meaning takes shape,

the shimmer waited —

not missing,

not lost —

only unconstrued.