May Yoube might have been born blind, but her imagination had no limit.  May Yoube’s dreams went on and on. Forever, in fact; they never did stop.  They never even slowed down – not for anything.
May Yoube had an imagination that never learned to fear.
May, you see, could not see a thing. Still she knew what everything looked like. Because everything was just how she pictured it.
Constantly, people tried to tell May Yoube what was what: ‘Purple, May, is a cross between dark black and sky blue. Like the evening right before stars come out.’
May would think back:  What was black? What do stars look like? What color is a sky? But May Yoube never could know what others saw as true.
May had done what May Yoube had to do – create her own truth. In May’s mind, black felt like cream and tasted like the warm, oatmeal cookies mama baked.  Sky was the first, funny, unknown touch of the sea. And the stars, to May Yoube, must look like the sound of her best friend’s giggle.
For May, the world was exactly what she wanted: her own.  She saw the world only how she wanted it to be seen.  Even though she couldn’t see, she still could.
May Yoube began to paint the images in her imagination. Very soon, the world fell in love with her art. Mays dreams really touched those who loved her paintings.
Somehow, every one who bought a May Yoube original was inspired. They began to believe that if you wanted something enough for the right reason, the world would color itself for you. They began to understand that we all can make our worlds as we wish.
The world with all its beauty just loved May Yoube ideas so much and bought them faster than she could paint them.
One night at the gallery a tiny giraffe reporter asked her how she got to be so famous. May Yoube, without pausing for one second, said this: ‘Tonight I may be famous and you ask why.  I always just believed, I suppose is my answer, Giraffe. All my life, people were convinced I couldn’t see, that I was blind, but that’s not true. I saw it all, just not as it looks to you. This is my reality. Everyone has their own, I know, as true and fresh as mine. All I did was make the best of it.’
May Yoube signed all her paintings with May, then You, with the B and the E set as two big smiling wide-opened eyes.

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KJS, 1997