Grey

There was nothing but grey at the top of that sleet-drenched shallow slope. You ran in bursts, your pride fighting with your desperation not to miss the train you’d promised none but yourself you’d ride home that day. You always broke promises to yourself. You quit smoking four times a week. You launched a coup against carbs, raged wars against procrastination, and continuously swore never to swear again. Yet here you were.  Cursing under your breath you prayed that the panini you had for lunch would not return for revenge as a stitch in your heaving side, your hot clammy face struggled to draw enough breath for your brisk pace through your black-tar lungs. Determination was all you had to fight off this latest narcissistic disappointment.

   You passed some men in orange dress, all clad with hard hats and judgmental smirks. Now you sped only to avoid them; there was no need for saving face with one as ruddy as yours was then. Your eyes drank in the violent tangerine of their (not so) blue-collar disguise. You felt it bleed into your irises like the contrast dye of an impending CT scan, throbbing through the rods of your retinas and searing your mind with an abhorrent hue. That’s why the grey felt so terrifying at first. As you blinked at it over the final step to the train platform, your chest seizing and your pits swimming, you worried it may be all you’d ever see. How cruel of that orange, to advocate medusa – proving now your world would be nothing but concrete; a blank, dreary monochrome rainbow. Yet your shoes were still blue, albeit worn. Your knuckles were still red and raw with your cold. Your world was the same and the grey was just grey.

   You looked closer at the advance. It seemed to stretch beyond the sky and travel through everything. A prison suspended above the cell of your existence, trapping you in your own desolation. At first you didn’t know why that sky made you feel so helpless; but through your furrowed confusion a name surged into your mind. A name you’d promised you’d never forget. A name that lived in your heart for so long that you thought the letters would sit as scars on the organ until long after you succumbed to the moist dark earth. The grey laughed at you as you remembered the day it was frowning upon, remembered the name of the boy you lost, remembered to feel every convulse of mourning in one throat twisting crack of thunder screamed at you by the hysterical clouds. It was as if his face was sewn into every refraction, his tears seeping on you disguised as innocent rain – the other commuters seemed oblivious to the blood that was drenching the bitter November storm. Your hands were stained with his death but you were so used to the guilt you forgot to see the crimson. It was only as you held them up to test the leaking iron sky - to judge the suitability of fetching your umbrella from the depths of your stuffed travel bag - that you found your hands, not pink with the brunt of the chill, but on fire with the shame of his passing.

   You panicked as you viewed them and scrubbed them manically against your jeans, but no chemical in the world could bleach him from you. Dry sobs cut through your throat as you struggled to clean him from your palms, scraping against the metal ribbed bench you sat on as disturbed onlookers edged down the platform, and averted their gaze from your grazed numb hands. The stone advance had served its purpose, and rightly left you to your grief. The hidden sun fled to traumatize another lonely soul, and all you were left with was a date, and a name, and a black, endless sky. The dark was cold but not malicious, it let you hide in it as long as you kept quiet. But why were you so quiet?
    The moon smiled a soft encouragement as you raised your tired eyes to its stormy castle once more. Droplets fell into your pleading eyes and you realized why you were so aghast at the ashen miasma that first met you where the tracks came in to view; it was so empty, it was so bland, there was nothing there. No noise, no memory, no emotion; your sobs were raw with no lubrication, no tears to help them pass. That was where the true horror resided, you couldn’t cry for the boy you promised you’d love forever – because forever had come far too soon. He was naught but a faded memory. You couldn’t make room for the teenager you’d cherished, not there in the heart of the adult you’d become. You had outgrown him, and in his death he’d never catch up. You felt something snap in your chest and then your face became flooded with hot heavy tears. You laughed at the rain as it buried your cackles; the wind snatching them as they left your quivering lips. Of all the promises you’d ever made to yourself, vowing never to stop loving a ghost was the most liberating obligation to ignore.