Color Me Blue

White. That was the first thing he noticed as he approached the dilapidated barn. The barn had definitely seen better days, but it told a story that he needed to hear. Among the tattered rubble surrounding the barn, he searched for anything to anchor himself to reality, but the visage of the barn drew him in and choked him to his very core. White. It reminded him of that face, his face. His bright shining face was a blank canvas that would have been so saturated with color. Instead of being painted with an independent brush, choice was stripped and painted in reluctant camouflage that would later leave it as bare as it was at the beginning, only now without any hope to become a completed piece of art.

The burnt carnelian graced the bright side of what remained of this haunting relic, but it cracked away at the center to reveal a small opening. The hole was just big enough to peer through with one eye. Red was his favorite color. What used to be a warm color now seemed so cool, much like how a body is filled with warmth and light until it just isn’t. Blood runs cold. He imagined the other side of the barn wall: a child playing and ignoring the pressures of life. A red face was something that only happened after a long day’s play and not the result of extinguishing someone’s life-force. Red eyes swollen in grief began to leak salt tears that refused to break the surface until now.

Black was the only thing through the tiny gape. No vision. Vantablack. The absence of discernible figures seemed to echo inside and refract off the walls, impregnating every inch of space. The eye simply could not perceive. The void was so loud and massive. It was ever-present yet isolating. The absence possessed a substantial piece of reality but had no tangibility. It was like an infection, a plague that swept through and made a home inside a once vibrant, thriving barn. When he peered through, he was seeking some kind of closure or maybe just something to make him feel again, but the view was only a mirror, like a jagged shard of glass. Empty.

Blue was the sky that surrounded that barn. Blue was the atmosphere that flooded the morning firmament much like the refraction of the tears that fell from a face that finally allowed itself to grieve. In this barn, there was a catharsis that became a catalyst for healing. The coincidental he had crept up on crept up on him, allowing him to see that life is full of colors, like shades of blue that inundate a place unseen by daylight. The diluted blackness had dissipated to reveal a once-abandoned canvas could be painted over. In his hand was a paint brush, in the other, his own color palette for a new piece of art. What will he choose?