A World Without Colours

by Madeleine Beck

They tell me the world is painted in colours. I don’t believe them. The world is made of shadows, greys and blacks bleeding into each other in an endless hellscape. Once, someone told me to think back. Think back to the world before it was woven in black and white. Then I saw flashes of bright, crimson red. That was worse than grey. Whenever I think of a world stained with colours, the heart in my chest starts to splinter and break, and I wish it would stop beating altogether. 

The rain doesn’t help the chill in the world without colours. It’s freezing, and leaves skitter across the stone-grey gutters. People on the sidewalks laugh, but the world remains soundless, voices silenced before they can emerge. I pass an alleyway. Suddenly, I am on my knees, voice stuck in my throat, as the stones become slippery from something other than rain. It’s gone as quickly as it came, and the muted colourless world is back, where couples hold hands and act like they can’t see the things lurking in the shadows. I continue down the street. 

A boy chases a dog across a park, laughing. The world flashes, and a man is running around the street corner and out of sight, a shadow amongst shadows, silver glinting in his hand. He’s gone in an instant, disintegrating into dust. No one turns their head.

The shop clerk at the store smiles as she puts the items in the bag, before the smile melts and changes, features morphing into someone else’s. My heart shatters again, shards of glass cutting through veins and arteries, rending flesh. Colours flash before my eyes, and when they fade, the shop clerk is wishing me a nice day. That’s what the movement of her mouth says, at least. I wonder if she knows I cannot hear her. 

The days flicker by, snapshots of a grey cityscape stained with occasional blots of scarlet. It gets colder in the greyscale world. My fingers freeze with the chill, and movement becomes harder as the cold creeps up my limbs. A woman puts her hand on my knee, her warmth unable to touch me. I don’t know what she is saying, but I nod anyway, the movement taking all of my energy.

The cold starts weighing me down. I can barely move, each step like wading through water. Today I don’t get out of bed. The cold is pushing down on my chest, pinning me in place, freezing the breath in my lungs. I like the numbness, though. It is better than the sharp pain of before. 

They give me pills, as if that will help to fight the endless cold. Slowly, colours start to bleed back into the landscape, but it’s washed out, like a sepia photograph. The icy numbness is still there, but I can move. People’s voices return, but they are tinny and distant, coming from far away. It feels like someone else’s life. 

The memories return with the colours, flashes and images I can’t even process before they’re gone, leaving behind only an overwhelming agony that pulls me to the floor as my body tears itself apart, over and over and over again, and my mind shatters from the pain.  The woman keeps coming. She tells me it’s normal, that everything will be alright. I know she’s wrong. What does she know? She’s never been to the world without colours. The cold doesn’t flutter around her shoulders like a ragged cloak, doesn’t bind her in manacles that make her limbs weigh more than mountains. She doesn’t know anything. 

The world is spinning on the wrong axis. The sepia-tinted world is cruel, the colours not bright enough to fight the ever-increasing cold, but there nonetheless, taunting me in their washed-out tones. The lady says this is better than the world without colours, but what could he know? She hasn’t been here, hasn’t seen the horrible emptiness of this place, felt the torment of seeing a life you know you can never have. She hasn’t felt the icy embrace of the cold or the infinite weight it brings. I stop taking the pills. 

The colourless world returns again, and now it feels like returning home, the greeting of an old friend. The cold, no longer restrained, whips around me. Coiling tighter and tighter until it envelops me in a comfortable nothingness. It feels good, for a while. Numbness is better than the sharp pain in my chest. It blunts the edges of the knives inside my heart. 

But they return. Crimson clouds my vision, each snapshot pulling me down, as if into the depths of the Underworld, trying to claim me for its own. Shards of glass slash away at my skin, and my blood blooms into trees bearing poison fruits. The icy manacles binding me will not let me go.

I need to cut the chains. They were captors, adversaries, friends. But the weight of them is too much. The cold is freezing me. I can’t go on in the world without colours. I will freeze altogether, unable to move as the cold claims me as its own. So I must leave. I take up the shards of my broken heart, hold them in my hands and look at my reflection in the shattered glass. 

Pain blossoms in my chest, different from the cutting of my shattered heart, a pain that finally melts the ice that had long since built up within my frozen veins. Sparks scatter behind my eyes, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen. I push deeper, rending through flesh and bone, and the world finally bursts into beautiful, vibrant colours.