A Sense of Calm

Chapter 1: Green. The color of hope

       I never knew true pain until the day he disappeared. My world was made anew. Without him, my sunsets were no longer bright. The amber light melting into the vast, unending ocean became nothing more than grey and black nothingness. The bright blue sky looked dull and unwanted. The greens and blues and pinks and reds were nothing more than a faded memory. The light still remained, but a pool of greys and blacks and whites had taken the place of the plethora of color that I could no longer see, but had a faint memory of. He was all I had and when he left, he took the color in my life with him. I had no one to help me out of this dark spiral I was about to fall into. I began to retreat into my room. Dark and quiet. Quiet. This was the same sound crickets had begun to make. The sound of hummingbirds and howling wolves made too. I no longer heard the sound of sizzling bacon, but now it was a faint echo of what I knew. I didn't know that the longer he was away, the more he would take away from me. The slow fade of color and sound became more as I waited for his return. Eventually, I stopped missing the sound just as I stopped longing for him. The sound of laughter, waterfalls, and rain stopped being part of the life I knew. I only knew the nothingness that surrounded me. The sound of nothingness was no friend of mine, but to go into a world where sound was abundant and I could no longer experience it was nothing more than pain. Starved from color and sound, my life had become more tragic and more painful than anything I had felt before. To have these things taken away from me with no sign of it returning was more than I handle. I had become bitter and angry at him for leaving. Then I began to blame myself. Hurt and in pain I began to lose myself. The person I was had started to disappear like he did. It faded like the colors in my life. Light was shut out. I began to turn to darkness. This darkness grew into my heart. The loss I had experienced was too great a loss to endure. So darkness shut out the thought. At first it was easy, but the thought was an ever lurking villain. She would infest my mind then in times of pure lonesomeness I would be ensnared in her trap. I'd cry for an hour, a day, a few days, then I would return to my solitary way of thinking. This was life. This was happiness. No. This was existence. Until it wasn't anymore.

     The day the darkness fell away and light broke through was a day I will never forget. There were periods of time where the darkness would become too overwhelming and I would have to return to the light. Most times I was disappointed, because I would only return to my colorless, empty world. In my heavy boots that held me down like weights to keep me complacent in my life, I would wander for short periods of time. The boots would keep me contained and suppress my ability to feel the ground below me. I didn't want to feel what I couldn't truly see. I kept thick gloves on my fingers when I was outside and I could only feel the air. I usually would retreat back into my dim world more settled into my darkness than before. Surprisingly, on this particular day I remember opening the doors and smelling the crisp morning air. This was a normal occurrence, as my sense of smell was not impared, but accompanied by the sight of bright green grass blowing in the wind with dew covering each blade was enough to send me tumbling backward. I stared for a moment as my eyes adjusted. It was like confronting something I knew no longer existed, but seeing it in my memory and then to see it in real life was overwhelming. I slammed the door, almost fearful of this strange newish sight. I cried on the cold stone floor of my doorway. I couldn't tell you for how long, but I cried for enough time for the sun to rise high into the sky and for the morning dew to disappear into the air. This was normal for me, but the reason was brand new. I slowly stood up and cautiously opened the heavy steel, black door. Looking out into the world I could see that the grass was still green. It was a paler green, but to me it was brighter than the sun itself. The color was intimidating. I slipped my thick, muddy workers gloves off my thin, bony hands. The gloves fell to the ground and I leaned down. I unbuckled my boots and slid them off my feet, still staring at the intriguing new sight. The grass. It wasn't the green I remembered but it was more than I could ask for. It was a welcomed new surprise. I couldn't bring myself to smile, so pure shock was written on my face. My tears were still drying on my thin pale cheeks and as a trail of tears would dry another trail would cover it. I didn't even realise I was still crying until I was done taking my heavy boots and thick socks off. I wiped my face and stared down into the small forest of grassy blades.

     For a moment I hesitated to put my feet in the grass. What if these were my last moments and this was the last time I would ever see color again. What if I wasted the rest of my days in the darkness and in the quiet? What would I have gained? What kind of life had I lived? There was another moment of realization that I had. What if this was fate tempting me? If I stepped into the grass would that be my last moment. I stumbled backward again. Would retreating into the darkness be better than experiencing the color and brightness for a mere moment? I was unsure. I was frightened. I looked back into the cold darkness of my home behind me. How much longer could I live like that? Cold, dark, quiet, and hungry. That was what I had been through. That was my life for years. It had made me pale and thin. My hair is nothing more than thin strands of grey. My eyes became a pale grey, but not a grey full of life. It was dull. I had thrown myself into rejection, because life had rejected me. Taking my old home, no longer filled with the color I had known, and turning it into a palace of dull light was frightening. I had covered every picture and painting with shiny black trash bags. I blacked my windows out with black paint. I tore up the carpets. I threw away every glimpse of color I could remember. Shattered any memory of what life used to be. But now I was given the chance to get my old life back.

      I slowly stepped into the grass and braced myself for what may happen. The blades tickled my feet and I finally smiled. Feeling the warmth of the sun on my hands and feet and the tickle of the grass made me smile, then looking down at my feet to see green surrounding the grey. I hadn't been so happy in years. By instinct, as if my body had remembered past moments and reverted back to those, I looked up to the sky. The warmth of the sun hit my face and I closed my eyes for a moment. At that moment, I pictured the sky. I remembered the bright blue of the neverending sky and the warm rays of yellow the sun had smiled upon me. The clouds ranged from white, to grey, to orange, to pink. The difference being that the white no longer blended into the sun or the sky. I opened my eyes, my heart beating out of my chest only to see that the sun was still a piercing white and the sky was still an evermoving sea of grey, but this grey was different. It was full of hope.