Long before any of us were born, there used to be colour. True colour, the type that haunts your dreams with its brilliance. The kind that inspires great artists to create with vibrancy that's hard to look at.
By the time I was born, it was gone. Monochrome, black and white--call it what you will; names are a core influence on impressions. To me, it is simply grey. Quiet and bleak. Not something I would call saddening. It's simply there, like trees or birds. A thing that didn't grab my attention, because that's how things always had been. As is the case with people, however, everyone thinks differently. For my father, it was the death of him. Society was filled with corrupt politicians and suicidal youth because of Earth's ashen hue. As I grew up, I often saw him look out the window, or into the street before him and mutter to himself.
"God!" he said. "This is all there is?"
Every time he said this, I would stare at my feet. I pitied my father. He often told me about his teenage attempt at turning the dismal world beautiful. His foolish procrastination, his stupidity for using his spare time to relax. How much regret filled him for pretending to be so weak. Now, he was crippled with age, unable to force progression on his idea.
When I was sixteen, we had this conversation:
"Anya!" From the living room. My father was old now, all grey hair and wrinkles. A hunched back, a tired voice.
I set my book down on my bedside table "What is it, Papa?"
"I need to speak to you." My heart skipped a beat; surely he knew the crowd I was hanging around. Surely he noticed the last week's half empty bottle of rum in the cabinet, the speeding ticket in the mailbox. As I walked into the living room, I hoped that my face was void of any expression. As always, his eyes were kind. "Sit down, child."
I sat opposite him.
"I am old," he said. I couldn't help but smile. Papa, always blunt and to the point, even if it was about himself. "And Anya, you are young with your whole life ahead of you. You have the time to create something beautiful for the world. In fact--yes, I can tell. Your grandfather also tried to colour the world, and as they say, the third time's the charm."
Papa spent his younger days making paints. Colour was easily transferable into them because they were so small, and he'd passed down his technique to me. It was no big secret that I lived and breathed painting. When I wasn't wreaking havoc, I spent my time turning grey canvases into coloured portraits.
"Yes Anya! People will stop in their tracks and revel in the planet you create. Our spectacularly awful world will become spectacularly remarkable!" He said this with a smile on his face and tears in his eyes. I had a hard time catching his next words; they were feathers swept away by the wind. "Will you do that for me, Anya?"
Without a pause I answered: "Yes."
When I reflect on this conversation, I can remember every word, every thought, every feeling. My reasoning behind my answer was this: my father felt there was nothing notably good on our planet. I watched as he looked out the window with an expression like he was doomed on his face. I heard him ask God if this was the planet He made for us, I saw his paintings--the only way he could still spread colour--and cried at how full of regret they were. If there was one man who thought this way about the world, there were millions of other people who felt the same. If there was one thing I knew, or thought I knew, about the world, it was that you were never alone with your opinions. Whether you knew it or not. How selfish would it be if I--who had both the ability and the resources-- didn't take it upon myself to bring the change that so many wanted? How selfish would I be if I didn't grant this one wish to the man who raised me?
I began to worship colours. They were my day and night, my light and gloom, my greatest love and my worst enemy. They were my obsession and I became infatuated with them, just as my father had. When I began painting the world, weather washed the colours away. Over years, I developed new techniques and new formulas. As I began to make progress, my father told me he would spend hours of the day staring out the window beside his hospital bed.
I pulled together a team of like-minded people. I was right: my father and I weren't the only ones to want change in the world. Together we became transfixed by these colours like a moth to a flame. Like light to a black hole. Like fate. And heads began to turn.
One day, I got a phone call from the hospital.
"Miss Greene?" The nurse who cared for my father said from the other end of the line.
"Speaking." These phone calls were routine. In his age, Papa was subject to frequent mishaps, but never anything life-threatening. Nothing as life-threatening as growing old.
"Mrs. Greene, your father suffered a stroke and the doctors aren't sure if he'll make it.
I pressed the phone closer to my ear so I wouldn't drop it.
"Mrs. Greene?" the nurse asked.
"Yes?"
"If you don't feel up to driving, I could call you a cab--"
"I don't want to see him," I whispered.
"Pardon me?"
"I can't see my father," I said and hung up before the nurse could respond. The rest of the day I walked. When I reached downtown, looked around. By now, they grey had tints of colour in it. I stared at scores of business people, some of which I recognized from high school. I waved at them with what I hoped was a smile, but it was like I was invisible.
God, this is all there is?
My father died at three a.m. the next morning. According to the nurse who had phoned earlier, the last thing he talked about before his stroke was that he was proud of me for achieving what I had. That he thought I had gotten much further than he had, and in less time. My wife held onto me as I cried into her shoulder.
Blue had been my father's favourite colour. According to him, it could be used for anything--flowers in the springtime, an ocean abyss, angel's tears. And despite all the plans our group had come up with, when my father died, I doused the world in shades of blue. The entire planet. Outrage.
"She should lose her membership for that," one of them suggested. My wife, Mia, shook her head, gripping my hand tightly. Voicing her disagreement made her nervous.
"We all grieve in our own way, William; you can't punish Anya for this."
Never before had I seen so much malice in a man's eyes. The most terrifying thing was that afterwards, he said nothing. He didn't speak for the rest of the evening, and even after that he only issued curt goodbyes before rushing out the door.
Mia and I drove home. In books, the ocean was always depicted as blue. That's what we were in right now: an ocean as still as the dead. Papa had been right. Everyone did stop in awe of the colour I gave the world.
"You did it!" she said with the same tearful smile my father wore ten years ago. I smiled at all the people I saw on the sidewalks--taking photos, pointing, simply admiring.
So I had.
When the sun rose, the people were angry. Too bright, too unfathomable, too distracting from their work. How dare the culprit deprive from them their chance to succeed? There was one solution for whoever had drowned out their beloved grey: off with her head.
Since that was illegal, they were satisfied with washing the colour away. The man leading the clean-up was none other than William.
I stood inside my house and watched through the window as people went around with soap and water, brooms and brushes, and hatred on their once passive faces. I could only watch. They made short work of my father's memorial, and in less than two hours my street was void of any evidence that a daughter of a painter had lived there. As I watched, I couldn't keep away the thought that perhaps this cleanse was a good thing. If the world was meant to be colourful, wouldn't it have forced its way back somehow? If it was meant to be colourful, we shouldn't need to help.
The group formally broke up a couple weeks after that. Mia began pressing me to tell her what was wrong. I didn't seem like myself, was I alright?
I would kissed her cheek and ask, "What do you mean?" The question was genuine, because I hadn't changed. I'd just moved on. The first twenty-six years of my life was built on childish fantasies. We were struggling to get by; it was time to start thinking and time to start building up. It was difficult though, because everywhere I turned I was reminded of that part of my life.
Somehow, this youthful admiration for colours was a family characteristic of some sort. As we raised our children, they always managed to get their hands on paint. I spent fifteen years confiscating the stuff, getting them to focus on important things. And I was just about to give up when during a moment's reflection when I was forty-five I realized that both of them hadn't brought any paints into the house for months.
For a reason I didn't know, a tear fell down my face. I put a tissue to my eyes. It came back blue. I threw it in the fireplace.
From that day on, the world was grey.
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