When you're young, everything is extreme.
The days pass by in a pigmented blur as you chug shitty gas station liquor on friday nights (it tastes like shit) and sleep through your 8am classes. The good times are yellow and gold, exploding hues so bright you can taste them. The lower points are heavy, saturated blue, a weight that drags you into deep despair. Every moment, every decision, is painted, because it is. It just is. That's life, at least while you're young.
And, you, naive child that you are, take it for granted. Everything is just so bright, even when it's sad. Yeah, even sadness feels bottomless. Just like the good times. Almost one in the same. You live in it, and it aches. You don't realize how good it is to ache yet. You take it all for granted.
You take it for granted, because nobody ever tells you that it changes.
And it does.
You age, and the days get slower, just like your metabolism. You age, and foods begin to taste bland.
You age, and colors start to fade. Too slow to notice until they're gone.
Suddenly you're in your twenties, out in the world just like the adolescent-you dreamed about.
And the world is gray.
Not all the time, but most of the time. You go through these eras, really. Periods of time where everything feels almost normal. Sure, the colors aren't as fantastical, but they're there. Yellow is yellow. Blue is blue. Feelings exist, and they may be manageable, but they still hurt. Sometimes in a good way, too.
But then that era passes, and the colors go away.
You age, and they all gray out. Time ceases to mean anything, the clock inside of you that used to scream that the time is now, you only live so long, shuts up and doesn't make another sound. All the other noises in your head do too. The ones that cry and the ones that laugh, all quiet into nothingness, until its only your own voice. They are all your voices, but only one of them is you, and that is the only one left. And it hates you.
You will sit in these suspended gray eras and wait for them to pass, hoping, praying, that it doesn't stick this time. That the color will come back, ever duller with each passing phase, but still there. God, you pray it comes back.
Until it does, you just wait. Live the motions. Go to work, brush your teeth, pay your taxes. You live in constant dread of the day they go away forever. The day that the gray finally wins.
And it will, because you continue to age. Inevitably.
When you're young, everything is extreme. And when you're older, everything is just, nothing. Just gray.
