Black is the color that absorbs and is the antithesis of all colors. It is the color that dominates this website and a color I chose for its ability to create stark contrast and a somewhat more dark mood.

While white is all colors in light and none in pigmentation, black is the darkest application of pigment possible and to achieve it perfectly is near impossible as some degree of color always seems to remain. Just wash a really black piece of clothing enough times and watch the grey come.

While there are black people, of African descent, there is no completely black person as some degree of color always remains in human skin tones. Like there is no real white person in existence, even amongst albinos, there is no really black person although some people do approach this darkness.

And, on the darkest humans, the lack of pigmentation is beautiful and appropriate. Artist Kehinde Wiley has demonstrated this with his series of paintings that show the beauty of black skin with grand, ornate homage to African figures in the West and elsewhere. Black is a soothing, slimming, calming color. It dampens all else and, in terms of clothing, I find it my favorite color to wear.

It goes with everything except, I am told, shades of brown, but I have never seen this clash in colors that derive from the absence of color and the mixing of all colors, respectively .Black shoes and black shirts go with anything. A black belt, not only a degree of aptitude in martial arts, but also a universal accessory to almost any other color except, I have been told, brown.

There is also the association black has with depression. There was Winston Churchill's "Black Dog" as he called it, that was the name for his depressions. Many of the greatest leaders in history, like Abraham Lincoln, faced the blackness of despair and self-doubt. As someone who enjoys the benefits of and torture of bipolar disorder, I find the downs to be, at times, nearly unbearable.

It is very black and bleak indeed when no amount of will allows the depressed individual to rise from a mental and physical exhaustion that leaves the person in question wondering if it is better to endure the pain or end it abruptly. As someone with a family whom I love dearly, the thought of suicide, though present, seems only a fantasy to me and something that allows me to know that I am in control even though it is an option I hope I never feel so completely worthless to partake in.

Black is the color of space, expansive and empty. It is what lies between the light of stars and galaxies and clusters within clusters of galaxies. It is what gives definition to the universe in it's absence of pigment or light. Black holes are just those entities that have a horizon from which light can not escape.

Though, as these mathematical paradoxes known as singularities gorge on all the matter around them, they often take on so much so quickly that super-powerful jets of matter hurl out in jets of energetic material that span unparalleled distances in opposite directions away from the dark epicenter.

It is by the energy they swirl inward and spit outward that we know of the black holes at all. If one was wandering towards us, not near anything else, only the slight warping of space around it would be seen before the solar system we know would be taken in as quickly as the word "black" could be uttered.

Earth would become spaghetti and the sun would look like an oblong cone, the apex drawn into a place nothing survives with its original form. But, eventually, the black holes probably serve as the universe's recycling factories as they eventually become so massive that they can not eat as fast as they order up plates of this or that stellar or nebular region of our known empirical reality.