everything is grey.

grey

All I can see is an ocean of grey. 

 Grey mothers with worried faces shuffle grey sons into grey cars. Grey business men carrying grey briefcases walk into grey buildings. Their chatter sounds like white noise to me; all blended together and meaningless. The only variety I ever get is the white of a child, the black of a prisoner. When they mix into the rest of the crowd, they are still invisible.

I sigh and take a step into the street. I am grey too, but I wish I wasn't.

I adjusted the sleeves of my oversized black hoodie so that it fell over my knuckles. All my clothing was black. My hair too. It was only counteracted by the light grey of my skin and eyes, making me just as average as the rest of them. Uninteresting. Grey.

I walked across the intersection and put in my earbuds. Pierce the Veil blasted in my ears and a yellow haze clouded my vision. I skipped to the next track, red for My Chemical Romance. I liked things that were colorful to me. My music was one. Books, for another thing. People.

The only colorful person I ever knew was my brother. His eyes were blue, his laugh was purple, his words were green. But the grey took him too, after a driving accident. He was only six at the time. 

Children were allowed to be colorful, but society always got to them in the end.

I entered the grey building and walked up the stairs to my room. the bed was unmade, the walls covered in posters. A full bottle of pills stood on the dresser.

I refused to take the medication that they gave me. Sure, it made me feel, but what I did feel was wrong in a way I couldn't understand. I smiled, thinking of a lyric that had been sung to me earlier.

"Rather be dumb than sane, rather be numb than in pain." Palaye Royale was indigo to me; blue, with hints of red, black, and purple. Rich in some way: a conglomerate of other sounds and noises. 

The line was true though. I hated the grey, but what I hated more was the pain that replaced it when I took those pills. I threw the bottle out of the window, knowing full well my mother would replace it when she saw. It still felt good to do it, though.

These small acts of rebellion were the only thing pulling me away from the gray of the world around me. Not fitting into the grey made me feel good, whether it was by dumping my pills, refusing to make my bed, or turning up the music way too loud. But I could never really do what I wanted. I had to fit in at least a little. 

School was the worst for that. A set schedule, a set lunch. People knew who their friends were and where they sat in every class. We all listened to the same teachers drone on about the same things. 

I sat alone every day. I didn't want to be close to any of these people: they were all the same to me. Only people like my brother was ever intrigued me. He refused to follow the rules: he ran outside in the rain, he laughed at crude jokes. My eyes teared up thinking about him and I sat down on the bed, thinking. 

Only colorful people had ever mattered to me.

I had to find one.