Black and White

this story mentions or implies depression, agoraphobia, and dissociation. read consciously

I’m rushing to work again, and I know I shouldn’t.

I pick up my jacket, its pilling fabric trailing along the pavement - my scarf, once blue, wrapping itself possessively around my throat and mouth, I obstruct half my vision just so I might try not to catch a cold.

I remember this time of year as already quite white. The snow, the fluffy polar coats mothers adorn their children with, the sea birds that haven’t quite figured out they should’ve flown south. But plenty was colourful too; the bright colours of cars, reflecting off the icy pavement, advertisements along the highway, blaring their incessant propaganda, and of course the people. The people were the most colourful, I remembered that most distinctly. So bright in my memory a thought just on its own could make me smile.

Of course, now I realise, it’s all brighter in retrospect, as they say. The snow looks grey as it I trudge through - an off-white slush that feels like it insists you see just how dirty the world is now, even shining in rays of the sun, blinding and pale, but never white. Not quite.

The purest white I know now to be fiction, now that I see only in greyscale. A layer of grime seems to have left itself on my mind.

I pull my scarf tighter, like a dark shade of a snake.

I focus in my eyes out of my thoughts, and my feet skid beneath me on black ice, just regaining traction as the traffic light changes to red, and a car that would have hit me if I was a second too slow, passes. I catch my breath. I shouldn’t be rushing.

Weird pedantic thoughts cross my mind looking up towards the traffic light, forcing me to want to clarify to myself. In battle with me, I stubbornly try to refuse. ‘Red.’

The traffic light indicates Up; meaning stop. Slow down, catch your breath now, pay attention. The artifice of its light isn’t recognisable in the sun, and I can hardly assume it’s lit without squinting. It indicates Centre; meaning almost ready. And then it is at last Down; Go.

As irritating as it may be, I am having to reteach myself everything. I step again into the street, not checking for cars, indignant as I am - the pedestrian light moved from top to bottom, and so I can go.

Though it is this spectrum I find most upsetting, nowadays. I catch myself before I fall onto a new slick pavement, and pick up my coat again. I find it ironic; ‘thinking in black and white’. Well, now that’s all it seems life is. We see now in black and white. Or, a series of greys that forces subjectivity more than ever. A direct line between right and wrong, and a whole collusion of in-betweens that nobody can agree on.

In many ways, it makes us similar, now. All grey, all a shade, or a few perhaps, darker than white or lighter than black. In many ways, it’s driven us apart. I find that those I catch my eyes drifting across in the street look away anxiously, scared that they’ll see me and in my pale eyes the depth of their fear of the grey mass that now is life.

I think of the trees, now, as I walk anxiously down a smaller road. Those that line my path are dark and barren, as they always used to be in winter. But, as I imagine this I feel a bubble of emotion in my chest, as they’re shaded instead in colours of charcoal and rusty metallic. The autumn that just passed us was worse than this, even. Leaves cascading that were previously the brightest of my mind’s imagination, (I laugh), tones of all types of Santa’s red and green, or orange that’s almost pink with blush, were all now grey. So much grey, it felt hopeless to even picture what colours they might have once been. My mind, overwhelmed with ferrum, is underwhelmed by all else I try to distinguish.

Of course, it isn’t all distress and painful nostalgia. Artists and photographers previously praised for their grey-scale work came forward to encourage an optimism in our situation, bringing beauty out of an endless commercial grey pushing an unenthusiasm on our psyches. Politically, affairs seem to be in coalition internationally in a way I personally haven’t seen in my lifetime, nor in my parents’.

There is an air of ‘this will end’. This was explainable in the recent pandemic, but is less so now. We just don’t know what has happened. It is so unnatural. And so, unfortunately, I find myself the pessimist in a state of inevitable permanence.

So I’m left with my day-to-day. The pills I take are now colourless, a pale grey that I imagine could have been a baby blue, or a brightened maroon. The trees are charcoal even before they’ve even burned. The sky is always grey, no matter the weather. The children’s coats are nearly white, and all the colours of the world dark but too bright.

I used to be scared of it, the dark. It wasn’t obvious, a prickly anxiety creeping up on me, toes first, as if I was testing a swimming pool for its warmth. A fuzzy feeling, no, almost a non-feeling, until my hands disappear and I realise I can’t breathe; it has taken ahold of my heart and lungs. A small movement in the corner of the room - a sound in the dark, just enough to wake me up, to make me shock still with wonder and desperation - is it there? Has it come closer? I can’t see. I can’t see where it’s gone. Is it right next to me? I listen closely for breathing, but can only hear my own, ragged and hyperventilating. Is it my own? Is that voice my own?

I’ve grown to control it. Clench my hands by my side - they are mine. Wear headphones in the night, easier to fall asleep with and to ignore any sounds I won’t recognise. Soft blankets, large pillows. The absence of light cushions me, fills my lungs with sweet air, dusky and tickling but safe. My scent, my sweat reminds me that I’m home.

I should do my laundry soon.

I don’t remember my day at work. I think I was dismissed, though I can’t think of why. I am in bed, now, though. Alone. It’s not surprising to me when I notice that I’m depressed. But, this is the least oppressing place to be; blackout curtains of deep ocean blue drawn shut, my covers decorated in forests of green pulled to my nose, and my eyes wandering as if I could imagine the ceiling, pink and white like childrens’ medicine. In this degree of dark, I can almost pretend I can still see these colours. But I’m kidding myself. My eyes adjust, and I am clearly enveloped by shade and silt. My arms aren’t my own, even as I clench my fists and bring them so close to my face so I can see the lines and lines, and my blanket is heavy and rough.

Throughout the day, I heard rumours, so wild and conspiratorial that I was forced to listen in, as if there was a threat that I was the subject of their hushed whispers. “The brightness of the winter sun must be the answer, the blinding of your eyes in the sunlight, directly - just as a child might try! - might bring back colour. Several have claimed this as true, several have claimed to have done it already! In the streets, the people preach purity and blessings in the white, bleached of sin and true as it is. I hear them from my house,” they say, “screaming at the sun and its followers!”

I feel, unfairly to me, as though I judge too quickly against this, predisposed as I am to a hatred of religion. My mother in the church, and so my father too. My older brother fighting not their word and so my younger dying to it. I haven’t turned to them (my father or mother, or the church) since. I know that not every religion is the same. I’ve felt that pull towards the solitary faiths, the ones prioritising enlightenment over power. I’ve felt that pull back towards my own, as if I should be able to claim it from birth, mutilated as I was in its name, or if I should do so, perhaps, in the name of tradition. They are the same, to me, tied together as they are; tradition and religion.

I’ve never been convinced that love was made to be its centre, though, and feel more sure of that now. “, riots outside take its victims one by one. I imagine bright flashes of hot light as each glass smash coincides with a yell, and it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between the anger and the fear in the voices that meet me. You must join them before it’s too late for you too!”

The dark plagues me with its childlike monsters, the light promises in return a hero’s blessing. But, I cannot pretend I believe in either; in the absence of anything to distinguish shade from the bright, heroes must seem much like monsters. How would a virgin of God’s bright see me, so much lesser than them, as anything but a demon, or the monster hidden in the black of my bedroom’s shadow not assume I am the light’s knight eager to kill it?

I can only imagine suffocating to either.

But now I am in the street again. I notice the road, empty of cars, conveniently so, as I know from before that the highway was never built for pedestrians. So I walk from side to side, swaying between lanes, dreamlike. I am not walking to work, I am in fact not walking anywhere. I find that I am striding with a purpose unknown to me.

The snow has cleared up, and it seems the sun shines again. I could never distinguish the weather from the sky alone; it is even harder to tell now without those familiar signifiers of blue or grey. I crave the pink and orange I ignored every evening, missed because of a career that now means nothing. The sun glares harshly, the streetlights glint, although unlit, in its rays. It feels as though this star, so close, watches me, the heat of it biting at my neck as the wind’s chill sinks itself into my skin.

“Hello?”

I’m startled to hear a voice. I hadn’t thought I was deaf and dumb in the same way as I could be described as blind, but to hear or speak felt so unnecessary with no-one to do so. I turn to the sound, my hair whipping itself in the air. It is a woman, an old woman crouched over a handrail by a bridge’s edge, struggling to hold herself up. Her hair is grey, dying even at its roots, and her eyes feebly shifting from my face to the space behind my eyes, as though she can’t quite see me clearly.

“Hello.” I respond, gently. I’m self conscious of how hoarse I sound. “Are you alright?”

“Just fine, darling.” She smiles, now, lightly, and I feel a warmth cross my chest. Her smile is colour, I can almost see it, just beyond her lips and her irises, themselves monochrome.

She lifts her hand, and points past me, to which I turn to see to where I have been walking.

It is a church. A rundown thing that - no, it can’t be a church. There is no reason why I should have thought it a church, but it strikes me as a building made for communion and service. My heart immediately quickens, and I turn back to the woman, but she is small, and she looks as though all she needs is to be close.

“Please,” is all she says.

So, I bring her into the house she points to, holding her beneath her arm as her feet shuffle quietly beneath to the breeze. I’m conscious of how cold she must be, but her forearms are bare, textured with patterns of age and soft despite it. Her back is covered with only crocheted woollen patterns, spiralling like, or it reminds me of, silvery spiders’ threads, just silken to the touch.

Then when I open the door of the building, I am not greeted. There is nothing; a warm blackness seems to reach out of the doorway, into the light in which I’ve come from, and for a moment I cannot tell if my eyes have yet to adjust or if there is no light inside at all.

The old woman thanks me, and before I can even make a sound, she steps inside, letting go of my arm, and disappears. I gasp unintentionally, and call out for her. “Hello?”

There is no response. She has fallen into the black door, and I cannot see her. With desperation, I turn to the street behind me, expecting to see her there - or maybe to call out to someone who might help me - but in my state of surprise I forget the light, and as I lift my hand to the sun shining directly ahead, it is far far too bright; and I fall backwards.

I nearly scream. I cannot see. The prickling fear reaches up to me, now wrapping itself around my spinal cord, rendering me paralysed, fear icing itself directly in-between my ribs. In the split second that I fall, I think that I must’ve died; that is the only explanation my brain can form; the air trapped in my throat just so I cannot let it out or let any more in.

But then I am caught. Or, I think I am. Perhaps I keep falling, but with no rush of air, no whistling of a ground far beneath me. I’m cushioned by an endless black that stretches beyond me and into me; and yet it still terrifies me.

All the time that I was able to be wrapped in my own blanket, safe, in bed, sheltered from the dark from a fear greater than me; but here it is, and I have no shelter. I am envolved in the darkness, and I know I’ve been taken by death, far too early.

But I remain. And my thoughts, they remain, racing until I am tired of thinking. And I am sure I am still alive. Though I cannot see, though I cannot hear, though I cannot feel. A voice, like a thought, reaches out to me.

You are safe.

I am falling.

You are not.

I know then that it is right, and I am not. I am standing, as much as one can in a void of darkness. Without a floor. I cannot see.

You can see.

I know then that I can see. I see myself, and I see all that surrounds me. It is dark and void, it is there without distinction. But it is colourful. As I move myself for the first time, I am colourful.

You are colourful.

I am colourful.