You're My Colour

Status: One part nauseous, two parts heartbroken.
Music: "Beautiful Freak" by the Eels.

I feel like I’m back in the monochrome room.
Cue the smallest violin quartet in the world is playing just for me as I elaborate. Or ramble intangibly; which ever takes my fancy.

Years ago, there was just me. Me in a monochrome room.
And that was ok, because that was all I needed.
Friends came and went, family was practically non-existent – but were compensated with microwavable dinners stacked in the freezer, the high school boyfriend stayed for a few years before falling back into the routine of the casual friend who smiles and waves to you at social gatherings, asking, “How’s your day? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
And that was all ok.
Because there was just me.
Just me in a monochrome room.
And I had everything I ever wanted, because it was all I’d ever known.
So you meet people and exchange pleasantries. You make your plans and goals and you stick to them. You keep yourself busy because the thinking space is just a little too overwhelming. You see your world in perfectly tangible black and white, right and wrong, the principles you keep, the ideals you reject; there is no compromise of self. You let the world bounce off of you and not take the insults to heart, at the same time, never feeling a want or need to be attached to anything or committing to anyone.
Because all you need is right here.
Right here in the monochrome room.
The monochrome room is a place of contentment and the knowledge of self.
And then the world exploded.

When colour hits you for the first time, when the door of the monochrome room finally swings open, it’s absolutely terrifying; the mental equivalent of having your stomach turn upside and churn unpleasantly when you take a step forward only to have your foot fall through and you realise there’s no stair beneath you anymore. You tip toe out and feel your pulse throbbing at your fingertips as you leave the room and escape out into the colour world for the first time, clinging to the shadows and wisps of grey you find because the dazzling light is too bright and too alien to comprehend. You try to turn back, to do what has been done before and go back to the bleak but familiar monochrome room, but the colour begins to seep into the bottom of the soles of your shoes, the tips of your hair. You try to push it away, but another wave hits you. It’s beautiful and it’s strange and it beckons you deeper in, but you keep waiting for the trap door to open beneath your feet and an abyss to swallow you up and vomit you back into the world of black.
You begin to miss the black and white security of the monochrome room.
The hours go by, blurring into days, weeks, months. You find yourself escaping more and more into the coloured world, loathing the monochrome room with every passing moment for robbing you of joys you never knew existed. You loose yourself to the coloured world beyond the white-wash walls of the monochrome room, looking down at your hands to see the warm flesh tones seeping into your fingertips and washing away the grey. You bathe in the colour and breathe it in like oxygen. It completes you.
And finally, you let go.
You tumble through the new coloured dimension like Alice down the rabbit hole, your mind reeling from a crazy high with every passing jar of orange marmalade. Even the brown of the dirt beneath you is intriguing. You shed the black and white, the right and wrong, the certainty and safety, the definites of self, the fear of insecurities in a coloured world, all for a chance to become pigmented. Principles blur, the ideals deteriorate, religion dies; there is only now. You devour every slight sensation and cling to every marvel however seemingly small or insignificant; even the mundane in the coloured world is divine.
Throughout the years of falling into ecstasy, you fail to notice that the colour in you is beginning to bleed away.
Until finally you are expelled. You’re dubbed the monochrome girl in the coloured world and, kicking and screaming, you are forced back to take your place in the monochrome room.

Alone now, amid the shades of grey, the things that satisfied you are nothing more than a cruel reminder of all you’ve lost beyond that locked monochrome door. Nothing is desirable. There is no taste. The air is stale. Your eyes – and your heart – ache for their loss. You wonder how you could have possibly survived for so long within this monochrome prison, not questioning or knowing or caring to know all that you had been cheated out of from beyond the monochrome room.
You scream and cry and bang against the monochrome door with monochrome fists, but the colour beyond carries on without you. There is no want or need for monochrome within the perfection of a coloured world. Yet your pious devotion goes on.
You are alone.
You in a monochrome room.
The monochrome room is all you’ll ever need.
But it’s not ok, because it’s nothing of what you want.

The trouble with monochrome is that once you’ve lived for years in a world of colour, once you’ve gone through the painful confusion of discarding everything that held you to that world of black and white for just a glimpse of that rainbow in the hopes that you’ll be a part of it, it’s impossible to return to the monochrome room. Your eyes have been opened and you’ll never truly be the same.
But it’s alright. Shades of grey aren’t so bad.
It’s not in the least comforting or satisfying. But it is bearable enough.

So here I am, back in the monochrome room.
Trying to forget how terrifyingly beautiful the colour was.