The Grey World

Ever since I was a little girl, I heard endless stories of romance that gave life colour, and how finding your soulmate would light up the world around you. My mother and father always encouraged me to seek it, but I never truly felt the need for it. Even in my teens, when most of my friends were dating, I still found no reason to pursue romance.

By the time I was in my early twenties, my parents were pushing me to meet people and find my soulmate, but the more they pried, the more frustrated I became. All my life, I had only known a world void of colour: everything I ever saw was black, white, and grey—and my parents’ constant badgering only made those colours even darker.

One day, I overheard them talking about me when I was staying over for the weekend. Dad said he was worried that we wouldn’t be united in the afterlife because I’d be stuck in a limbo of darkness if I didn’t find my soulmate. A week later, I convinced one of my friends to pretend to date me; we told my parents that we thought we were soulmates. Their faces lit up with joy when they heard the news. I hated seeing how pleased they were. They only thought they knew what was best for me.

Not two weeks later, my parents died in a car crash…

I spiralled deep into depression and was lost in my thoughts. Even though we never saw eye-to-eye, I still missed them so much. But I was at least glad that I managed to convince them that I had found my soulmate before they passed. Even if it were a lie, at least they didn’t have any troubles on their mind about me in their last moments. But their deaths pushed me to find an answer to the mystery of my life: was romance really meant for me?

After I graduated from university, I dived deep into research, looking into everything we knew about the colours of our world and how people only saw it when they found romance. On that journey, I found other people who were the same as me; they, too, could never envision the world of colour that everyone else described.

My work led me to build a machine that would give me the answer, but a small miscalculation led to its malfunctioning, and my being electrocuted. While unconscious, I came to see an inverted world: everything was upside-down, and I was floating mid-air. Colours that were usually dark were light, while those that were light were suddenly dark. It was then that I saw them—a figure, cloaked in black, suddenly appeared before me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I have no name, because I do not exist. Neither does this place.”

“Am I dead?”

“That will be up to you and your definition of ‘death’. I am merely a mediator, here to guide you. Nothing more.”

“A guide for what?”

“Everything here is reflected out there, and vice versa. As long as you seek colour in the lenses of others’, you will never truly find it.”

“Then how will I find it?”

“You don’t… You create it.”

Their words resonated with me. I suddenly began to see the world around me shift, twisting and turning to rearrange itself. The figure then began to fade. “You finally see it...”

Everything that was upside-down now came to its rightful place, and from the deep shadows emerged colours I had never seen before: purples and greens, blues and reds—they were all seeping through and coating everything around me. Bright colours of yellow and amber started to saturate the skies, and many more hues blended into the vicinity and breathed life into it.

I soon regained consciousness and found myself seeing colour for the first time in my life. It was truly breathtaking. That experience gave me the encouragement I needed to help others like me who were out there, struggling to find themselves and their truth in a world that told them otherwise.