You only see black and white and gray ... until you touch your soulmate.
________
The world was… gray.
Gray, and white and black. Faded in some places, and in others smudged, much like when you’re drawing using soft oil pastels and you accidentally run your hand across a colored part and it spreads throughout the drawing. Just like that. Trees? Gray smudges against white and faded gray skies. Hands? Solid gray, shadows black, faint white. It’s always been like that.
Everything in pale, stale, colorless grayscale.
It’s not all like that though, how else would other people tell you such vivid stories about how wonderful the trees looked -- they called the color “green” and the sky “blue”. Terms so foreign…
Everything in gray… until you meet someone who’ll make the color burst into every little nook and cranny. Make everything bleed with it. One touch is all it takes. One touch out of billions of others. How… beautifully frustrating and innocent.
________
Jennie was late, late, late, late, and she knows this wasn’t good. Not when she had an important meeting with someone who was offering her a ticket out of this hellhole.
She fumbled with her shoes, while keeping her phone sandwiched in her hands along with countless other things she needs for the day. Laptop? Check. Wristwatch, very important, Check. Presentation? Double check. Keys? Wait… keys… where were her goddamned keys?
Jennie goes over the door side table, picking up the potted plant, hoping to find the spare key underneath.
Nothing…
Great…
She takes a quick glance at her watch and she sees, give or take twenty minutes she could spare. Twenty minutes, twenty-minutes…. Jennie bites her bottom lip and jogs to the door.
Keys be damned, Jisoo has some explaining to do when she gets home.
Jennie calls for a cab and prays to non-existent Gods, he’s a crazy ass driver, and prays even more for traffic to be non-existent. Tough luck though.
_________
Jennie loved drawing, loved the feeling of running her pencil against the paper, watching it go round and round as she tried to draw a tree. Loops make for great leaves, don’t question it. She scribbles little loops, round and round until they fill the tree.
“That looks beautiful Jennie.” Ms Chaeyoung’s praise was always her favorite. She’d sit right at the front after recess just so she’d see her drawings. She liked it when her art teacher saw more than what others failed to see in her. That she was good too.
“Why don’t you use this one…” Jennie looked at the curious thing in front of her, because when you’re five years old and curious, everything’s curious too.
She takes the small stub from her teacher’s hands and looks at the thick gray pencil?
“It’s an oil pastel, you can use it to fill the leaves here.” Jennie follows her slender fingers as she traces over Jennie’s loops, “It’s the color of the leaves -- green” She smiles, and Jennie smiles back.
“Green?” Jennie looks back at the pastel in her hands, “but… they all look the same..”
“They do, for now…” Rosie, as the other students called her, sat beside her. Cradling her chin in her hands as she looked at Jennie’s drawing. “In time, you’ll see there are far more beautiful colors out there, aside from gray.”
“Really?”
“Really, and you’ll find yourself wanting to capture each one of them in one of these drawings. Capture every bit of it and hold on to it. Someday Jennie, you’ll see..”
Jennie looks back at the paper, at her loopy tree and does what she hopes was the right thing to do. She takes the “green” pastel and runs it over and over again, against the paper until light gray turns darker and darker. She looks up at Ms Rosie and smiles, because she knows what Ms Rosie sees was far better than the boring gray that’s everywhere... What she sees was green, and that was enough for Jennie.
________
She felt her phone vibrate and she digs into her pocket to fish for it.
07/13/2018 6:48AM
Hi, Jennie this is Mingyu. I hope you haven’t forgotten about that lunch with Mr. Hansol today. We need that deal.
Great, just what she needed. Someone breathing down her neck.
I’m on my way. I’ll get the deal.
Sent
She found herself at an intersection, squeezed in between busy bodies who were all in a hurry to get to work, just like her. She lets out a deep sigh, this is why I hate commuting. She finds herself thinking how much of them were empty shells of themselves? Living everyday, just so they can live?
She sees the signal light change from stop to go and she takes long strides, squeezing herself against the wave of people who were doing the exact same thing: crossing the street.
Buzz, buzz.
She takes a quick glance at the message.
07/13/2018 6:50AM
Great. We’re counting on you.
She almost drops her phone as she collided with someone in front of her.
“Fuck, watch it!” Jennie says through gritted teeth.
She looks up and sees the back of the stranger get lost among the sea of people behind her.
She looks up and sees everything around her.
“Hey lady! Move it!”
Jennie flinches as the car in front of her blared it’s horn.
How long was she standing there? In the middle of the street?
She sprints across and takes a deep breath as she reached the other end.
_______
Jennie wanted to be an artist when she grows up, or an art teacher just like Ms Chaeyoung. That was what she thought of as she drew lines, lines to the little house she made in the middle of a pretty garden.
She was told the news, yesterday, of what her parents called an “accident”.
She kept drawing the lines over and over until she realized far too late she drew right through the paper, and sees faded white tears against dull gray.
She empties the box of pastels, Ms Rosie gave her -- the one’s with labels because how was she to know which was red and which was yellow when all she saw was gray? She takes the one labeled orange and runs it across her squiggly clouds. Orange sounds pretty, that was what she eats sometimes, oranges, small circle citrus fruits that made you wince but tasted really sweet right after. And if she was asked, orange sounds like the color of the sky, you look up and wince from the sunlight but feel real happy right after -- the same thing an orange would.
She fills in every blank space with it. Tomorrow… tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow would mark the first day of school without Ms Rosie. No more praises for her drawings, no more saying she was good.
_________
Ten minutes…
She had ten minutes left and she stood there, stood there as people bumped into her and she looked up.
The sky… the sky was no longer gray, it… it washed her with a curious feeling that ran from her fingertips to the tips of her nose. So …. So this was “blue”?
She laughed, dark solemn faces around her watched in disguised disgust.
This was blue… this was the color of the sky. Light, fluffy and sweet. She looks around and runs towards the closest tree. Running her fingers across the smooth surface of a leaf, feeling the light dips of its stems, slashed across. She see’s calm, a restless calm as they ruffled against the wind -- this was green… She glides her hands across the trunk and tilts her head. Strength, old musty strength… brown?
She steps back and takes a deep breath… These… these were all colors. Colors seeping into every fiber of everything she laid her eyes on. Colors that made you feel, made you… made you appreciate the little things that existed. Who knew, who knew how beautiful it was to see white against blue? Who ever thought that gray looked pretty, the gray buildings against the greens of the trees and the blue of the sky and the reds of the little signs that poked through the tiny shop doors by the side of the street.
Who knew… Colors would rekindle a dead dream in her. Screw that meeting.
_________
“You what?!” Jisoo’s concerned voice echoed out against the noise in the cafe.
“Calm down, it’s not like I killed someone.”
“No, but you sure as hell killed your career! What would your mother say?”
She loved Jisoo, but she was… a bit overbearing sometimes.
“Mother’s opinion is irrelevant.”
“But…”
“I miss drawing Jisoo, It was what saved me all those years ago.”
“Did you not see who it was? The one you bumped into and made you look at all these … colors?”
“Brown hair…. That’s everything.”
________
Jennie paces back and forth. This was her first ever Art show. First time ever she’ll show the world how she sees it, and how sometimes gray can look good but colors even better, and how she’d tried her best to capture everything into a canvass.
“These look absolutely breathtaking.”
Jennie hears a soft voice behind her and feels a snap of a camera.
“Beautiful…”
“You think so?”
“I know so… Look at how the artist did the lines here. It looks so simple, but you know there was much thought put into it. Clouds were meant to make you dream, and make you feel happy and the way they did that here shows how much innocence was placed in the stroke that it makes you feel happy too? Do I make sense?” She gives Jennie a silly looking grin.
Jennie turns around and sees her looking at the painting with awe.
She misses this, having someone look far beyond what was on paper or on the canvass. She misses someone seeing her for who she was, and what she wanted to say through her works
“I think you make perfect sense.”
She takes another picture.
“Do you know who the artist is? I want to tell her how wonderfully perfect this is too.”
“Thank you.”
Jennie can’t help but laugh at how fast confusion changed to a look of realization and what she hopes was adoration at the end.
“Shit. For real?”
Jennie nods and smiles.
She jumps as she takes a picture of her, bathed in the flash of the camera.
“A remembrance.” She gives her another innocent looking grin.
“Huh, not everything can be …”
“Captured by a lens?”
“Yes…”
“Hmm think of it like your drawings, I take pictures to show the world what I see, and right now I see a very beautiful person who has a lot to say about the wonders of seeing colors for the first time in her work.”
Jennie froze… how, how does she know that?
“What?”
“You draw like you’re seeing everything for the first time, strokes here are never neat… Like you’re afraid not capturing it on paper would make it disappear, so you go through everything you see and put that on paper in a rush.”
“I… I do?”
“Yes, and it’s beautiful when you think about it because a moment could only last for so long. And what you did here? Shows how well you captured the moment and immortalized it in your painting. I strive to do the same with pictures.”
Jennie finds this odd, how someone could see far more than what she hopes them to.
“We can talk more about all this if you want, over coffee?”
“Coffee?”
“To celebrate your exhibit. Everything’s quite lovely.”
“Oh uhmmmm…”
“My name’s Lisa by the way.” She gives Jennie a warm smile, and she feels something inside her stir.
“Su- sure… Jennie”
_________
“Why can’t I see what you’re seeing?” Jennie asked through sobs. “Thish, Thish is sho unfair.”
“You will someday, just like I did.”
“How?”
“A touch, a touch is all it needs Jennie. A touch from your soulmate.” Chaeyoung answered in chuckles.
Jennie stops crying and looks up at her.
“Soulmate?”
“Someone who… understands you, far more than you understand yourself. It's this invisible string of connection between the two of you, a mutual respect, an unconditional love and a total understanding. Someone who just gets you.”
“I … I don't understand.”
“I don’t expect you to, you’re only five years old.” Ms Rosie, laughs.
“What’s so funny.”
“You are… very wise, wiser than your age Jennie. You see everything and that’s the reason why. You see everything and try to understand them. You’ll meet them someday and you’ll just know.”
__________
Lisa chuckles at her stupid joke, and Jennie smiles back.
“I love you, you dork.”
“You do?” Lisa raises her brow, leaning in to give her a kiss.
“I do, very much. I don’t know why but I sort of do at the same time.”
“Make up your mind.” Lisa laughs again and Jennie feels the butterflies inside her stir.
“I had this art teacher before… who I loved very much. She was, I think, the only one who really tried her best to understand me. I was a very lonely child back then and the loneliness could get rather suffocating, and she was… she was there to show me how good I am. And she, she made it seem like she saw far more than what the others saw which made me believe her.”
“Hmmmm, and?”
“She told me the only way I’d see colors was if I found my soulmate.”
“Why are you so worried, or upset?”
“Because Lisa, what if it isn’t you?”
“So what if I’m not?”
“I -- you remind me so much of her. You see far more in me than I ever could”
“I bumped into my soulmate accidentally.” Lisa blurted out, and Jennie finds it confusing. “Tell me, Jennie… Do I make you want to draw or live?”
“Both.”
“Then that’s enough for me.”
Lisa pulls her closer and kisses her forehead.
“I bumped into them at an intersection while crossing the street, she was so engrossed with her phone she didn’t see me. She said “Fuck, watch it!” I smiled, and walked into the sea of people in front of me and looked on across the street as her face lit up, taking in the new wonder of colors around her. I bumped into her again in this little exhibit of hers and told her what I saw, the beauty in her, and her work…”
Jennie feels like sinking, drowning, deeper into the swirl of emotions inside her from her revelation.
“Two souls don’t find each other by simple accident.”
Jennie stays silent so Lisa continues.
“What I meant was, it’s no accident we met each other that day… or bump into each other. I’ve hated seeing gray all my life, I’m glad you were on your phone, yellow’s my favorite color. It reminds me of that look of utter happiness and wonder on your face that day.”