Colors || a.i

in which a girl is alone

i guess you could say i had always been an introvert. it was always easier to keep to myself. i had no friends at school so i go used to the quietness. the loneliness of it all. if my head wasn't stuck in a book i was drawing or painting or creating... something. i built and it seemed like the universe was out to destroy everything i created and everything i was created from.

my dad left when he found out my mom was pregnant. they were still and teenagers and he didn't want anything hindering him from being a teenager. in a way i was pretty much a burden to both my parents my mom was just the parent that actually stuck around. she died in a car crash when i was five the week before i had to start kindergarten. i had to live with my grandparents. then one day in school it hit me: i didn't have parents. i felt alone. all the other kids had mommies and daddies. i didn't. and that was the first time i truly felt alone. and i was blue.

and when school did start no one wanted to be my friend. not with the weird girl whose daddy ran away and whose mommy went to heaven. not the ugly chubby girl with glasses. not with the quiet girl who always sat and finger-painted in blue and would cry when she did so. no not her. she was different. that's what they would say. when she asked her grandpa what it meant to be different. he said it meant i was the biggest brightest star in all the world.

ugly.

that was the other word they called me. i knew what it meant so i asked, "grandpa, am i pretty?" and he smiled and said, "you are the most beautiful girl in the whole world." then i was purple.

so then i would paint in two colors. because, yes i was blue, but i was also a beautiful royal purple. and the blue touched the purple. i had liked the way the colors looked together. the way they blended. they complimented each other well. i was happy i was more that just a depressing blue. i began to have layers. there was a boy with dirty blonde hair and dimples that were like craters on the moon that made me red. his name was ashton. i made him a painting of my two colors blue and purple. but it wasn't done because his color wasn't there. he gave me a color, another layer and it was only right that he see what he's given me. i put a single red dot in the middle of the page and have him my masterpiece.

"what is this?" he asked me with disgust dripping in his tone.

"it's me." i told him hoping he would understand it was how he made me feel. 

"it looks nothing like you." he spat back.

i lowered my head in shame. of course he wouldn't understand but i couldn't just tell him what it meant. i'm not good with my words. so i simply said back, "it's a gift for you."

he stared blankly at the paper i had put in his hands. "well i don't want it. you're weird." he said after a long silence and ripped the paper in half along with my heart.

he then took the royal purple i was and faded it to a lavender so sad it was almost grey. he made me grey.

when i was eight grandpa got cancer. then i was orange. as i watched him get treatment i became green. but not that primary school green. i was that grayish-green that gave you a kind of chill. it was a sad green. and when he finally died i was turquoise.

and then i was just a sad faded rainbow. where the colors has been smudged together and you could barely distinguish them from one another. where they began to come together and make a gray. for a while that's how i was.

grey.

nothing. numb. alone. and i was that way for a while. i was grey for a long time. until he came along again.

and i was exposed to a whole other world of colors i didn't know existed.