In Black And White, I'm Blue ✔

Chapter Four: Blue

In a world full of vibrant hues, I had always been blue. I was the blue rose of my mom's love story-a fleeting chapter in her life written in impulsive ink. There was no father in my story, just the whispered memories of a summer romance that left more questions than answers.

As a child, I was the one who cried rivers when I was lonely, which was often. The sky, the ocean, the melancholy of twilight-blue in many ways than one. My earliest years were a blur of quiet nights, the smell of lavender and cigarettes, and the soft sound of my mother's lullabies, songs she seemed to sing more for herself than for me. But that chapter ended quickly, with her struggling to raise me alone. By the time I was five, I found myself in an orphanage, a place meant to fill the gaps left by absent parents.

The orphanage was a world of its own, a microcosm of broken dreams and stitched-together hopes. The building was old, its walls worn by the passage of countless children who had come and gone, their stories leaving imprints that no amount of paint could cover. Life there was... manageable. I made friends, the kind that shared secrets and dreams late into the night, hidden under the covers with flashlights and whispered voices. There was Lisa, who always knew how to make me laugh, and Jamie, who could make up stories about faraway lands where everything was perfect, where no one ever had to be alone.

I was good at ballet. My feet found solace in the rhythm, in the way my body could move freely, untethered by the weight of the world outside the dance studio. Ballet became my escape, a place where I could be something more than just a quiet boy in an orphanage. My first love was in those mirrored walls-a girl with dark hair and a laugh that sounded like music. We were young, barely teenagers, and our affection for each other was innocent, pure. But it was brief, just like everything else in my life then.

The owner of the orphanage was kind, an older woman who had taken care of so many children over the years. But she fell ill, her health deteriorating like the crumbling paint on the orphanage walls. The uncertainty of her condition seeped into the lives of every child under her care, including mine. I was too young to be on my own, yet too old to be adopted easily. The future, once a hazy dream, became a looming shadow.

Eventually, I was sent back to live with my mother. She was not the person I remembered. The woman who sang lullabies and held me close was gone, replaced by someone I barely recognised. She had turned to alcohol, her days a blur of bottles and bitter words. We moved to a different country, a fresh start, she said, though I knew better. It was not a start, but an escape. I had to work part-time jobs to help make ends meet, balancing school with the constant worry of whether there would be food on the table when I got home.

Ballet became a distant memory, something I could no longer afford to indulge in. The studio where I once felt weightless was replaced by the cold reality of late shifts at a local diner, my feet aching not from pirouettes but from hours of standing.

I cried often-alone in our small, dingy apartment, the walls too thin to keep out the noise of the city or the sound of my mother's drunken rants. The nights were long and cold, the weight of the world pressing down on my small shoulders.

I still loved her, despite everything. She was my mother, and I wanted to protect her, to save her from herself. So, I did everything I could, even when it broke me, even when I had nothing left to give.

But she didn't want to be saved. One day, she left, choosing a man over me, abandoning me just as I turned eighteen. The irony wasn't lost on me-an adult in the eyes of the law, yet more lost and broken than I had ever been as a child.

She had left a note, a brief explanation scribbled on the back of a receipt. I read it over and over, trying to understand, to make sense of it, but the words blurred together, just like the tears that fell onto the paper.