For Every Missing Shade

Israel Taylor knows the world is a mess. In fact, it's all he can think about. As an avid artist, he imagines life as a black-and-white landscape, waiting to be painted. He uses a metaphor of color to describe everything he wishes the world was, but he can't help but feel stuck in the ocean of apathy high school life has become for him.

His first drop of paint comes in the form of a girl named Emma McKenzie. They fall in love as she shows him just how much color the world can hold. But, seeing color means seeing the full spectrum, and Israel soon learns that though there are colors more beautiful than grey, there are also colors that feel darker than black.

For Every Missing Shade is a blunt, funny, and intense digression into how the human spirit can create something beautiful even as beauty seems absent. Told in diary format through Israel's thoughts, dream sequences, and short stories, For Every Missing Shade is a new reminder that the world is not beautiful in spite of broken people. The world is beautiful because of broken people.

I initially wrote this as a short story for my creative writing class my senior year of high school. It was supposed to represent the two seemingly irreconcilable parts of my personality making peace with each other. Becoming something greater together. But, as I wrote this story, it grew and shifted into something bigger. It became a place for me to put everything I felt, realized, explored, and cried about during my high school and college life.

I don't want to spoil too much of the plot. Just know it's about a boy and a girl. A boy who was obsessed with creating a world that could finally cater to the oddity he felt he was. A girl who taught him just how much he'd been missing in life by trying to control it. And a life that showed how much it could give and how much it could take.