In the cold and desolate silence of my room, I sit, weary from a lifetime of half-lived days. Fifty years have passed, and I have come to the dull, unmistakable conclusion that this world—the world I have known—has never been truly mine. The colours I see, the world I walk through, have always been a prison.
It began, as all things do, with the touch—the singular, fateful touch of another. I was but an infant then, a helpless thing, with no memory of what had happened before. I lay in the arms of a stranger, wrapped in the warmth of their presence, and in that moment, as our skin met, the world exploded—not with light, but with colour. The starkness of the black-and-white life I had known was suddenly filled with hues of deep red, burnt orange, and sickly yellow. It was as though a curtain had been drawn back, revealing a world I could not understand, could not interpret.
From that moment on, colour was my reality—my only reality. A constant, unyielding presence in my life. I saw everything in its strange, warm, saturated form, but I thought little of it. It seemed normal. After all, how could I know any different? The others around me seemed to live with the same vibrant distortion. All I knew was that the world had never been clear. The colours bled into one another, a permanent fog of reds and yellows and oranges, soft and bleeding. But the vividness—it was my truth.
I grew older, and time passed. Yet no matter what I did, no matter how far I ventured, the world never shifted. It was always coloured by that strange, unmistakable lens. And I, trapped in a prison of vibrant hues, never thought to question it. It was as it had always been.
But then, one evening, my life—such as it was—changed irrevocably.
It began with a dream. I was walking down a long corridor, its walls draped in black velvet, the floor a gleaming white marble. As I walked, I heard a voice. Soft at first, but it grew louder, clearer, more familiar with each passing moment. It was a voice I had never heard, but I somehow knew. It was the voice of someone close—someone who had always been there, somewhere, in the shadows of my life.
I awoke, my heart pounding in my chest. My eyes snapped open, the familiar colours of my room swirling into view. The blood-red curtains, the yellowing wallpaper—the same sickly pallor of the world I had lived in. But it was not the world I had dreamt of. No. In the dream, there was a difference—a purity, a clarity in the space that had been lacking here.
As I pondered the strange dream, a sudden thought struck me, like a thunderbolt. What if the colours I saw—what if they were never meant to be this way?
For the first time in my fifty years, I wondered. What if this…this was a distortion? And if that were true, then the colours that had defined my existence—perhaps they were not the default at all. But something… unnatural.
My mind raced. The truth gnawed at me, relentless. What if, in that moment so many years ago, when I was only a baby, I had been touched by someone—a touch so powerful, so transformative—that it had altered the very fabric of my perception? But who? Who was that person? Who had done this to me?
I began to search the corners of my mind, digging into memories I had long buried, years of images and fleeting moments drifting in and out of my consciousness. And then it hit me—like a hammer to the skull.
The voice from my dream. That was the key. That was the one I had never truly noticed. It was the voice of my soulmate.
I recoiled, trembling at the implications. My soulmate—the person who, through a mere touch, had coloured my entire existence. I had believed them to be a mere spectre of my infancy, a fleeting ghost. But they were real. They had always been real. The truth of the matter was undeniable: they were the cause of my distorted world.
With a mixture of dread and anticipation, I searched through the faded documents of my life—the birth certificates, the hospital records. I had not expected to find much, but the truth emerged from the depths of the dust. A name. A name I had heard only once in passing, a name that was a ghost in my memory.
And that name was my mother.
I had never known the truth, never questioned it. In my youthful innocence, I had been told that my mother had died during childbirth. My father had raised me alone, and I had accepted that story as fact. But now, now the nightmare unfolded in full. My mother had never died. She had been taken. Taken from me before I could remember.
And worse still, she had been the one to touch me. She had been the one to trigger the alteration in my senses, to unleash the curse that had bound me to this world of false, bleeding colours.
The realisation struck like a knife through my chest. The colours I had lived with—those vibrant hues that I had come to believe were my only reality—were not meant to be. They were a prison, a distortion created by the touch of the one person I had always longed to see. My soulmate was not a distant dream. She was my mother, a woman taken from me before I had even learned to speak.
But why? Why had she left me in this cursed state? What had happened to her?
I wandered the streets aimlessly, consumed by this horrifying truth. The air felt thick, saturated with those same cruel colours that now held me in a grip of despair. My eyes burned, my thoughts a whirlpool of confusion. It was too much to bear. I needed answers. I had to know why she had done this, why she had left me in such a shattered world.
And then, as I stood in the middle of the street, beneath a sky smeared with faded grey clouds, I saw her.
A woman, older now, standing in the distance, her eyes vacant, her expression pained. She looked at me—my mother, my soulmate—and I knew in that moment the full, terrible truth. She had done it to protect me. To save me from a darker fate that could have been mine. The colours—this false world—were the price of safety. Her touch had been a sacrifice, a trap to shield me from the horror that was her existence.
As I stumbled toward her, tears welling in my eyes, I could hear her voice, faint as it had been in my dreams.
“You were never meant to know,” she whispered, the colours around us bleeding into nothing. “I did this for you. But you were never meant to see the truth.”
And as the world around me unraveled into nothingness, the colours disappeared.
And in the silence of my tragic, empty existence, I was left to mourn the life I had never truly lived, the mother I could never truly touch, and the endless prison I had created for myself.
A lifetime of colours, now gone. And I—lost forever in the grey.
