Gray

The sky turned gray many months before. It was winter then, and an unusually gloomy one too, so Mark didn’t notice straight away. But then one morning the sun came out. It was one of those beautiful white weekend days, perfect for creating not just one snowman, but a whole snowfamily (maybe a little snowvillage, even), the expanding mercury in the thermometer your only enemy. An hour later, Mr. Snowman already slowly melting away, Mark was still putting finishing touches on Unnamed Snowkid Number Two and his wife fixing the posture of her white alter ego, while a neighbour passed by. He made an off-hand comment about such a beautiful day, such a beautiful blue sky. Jennifer responded, “Yes, we’re so lucky it happened on a Sunday,” and Mark thought of protesting, since the sky looked exactly as drab to him as it did during the last few weeks. But in the end, he didn’t make too much of it.

Next time it occurred to him, it was some sort of a weather report on television, and he didn’t even notice at first — they were talking about hoping for summer to get here early, as if to make up for a crappy winter — until he thought about it later that day. Because what they showed didn’t exactly look very summery to him.

And then there was that wall photo from their honeymoon in Hawaii. “Those new prints fade much faster than they used to,” he thought to himself.

But that wasn’t it. And, over time, he pieced it all together. The sky turned gray, just for him. It always looked the same as during the cold days of November. And it wasn’t just nature. It was the same with photographs. And the same with movies. They went to the beach once, one of the first days of spring, and the water was also gray. And one day at work he pressed a wrong key on his computer, hiding the financial application, and the pretty picture on the screen looked unusual too — the meadow as green as he remembered it, but the sky above sad and lifeless. It wasn’t just green that he could see; blues, violets, and oranges were still perfect elsewhere, but the sky — afternoons, sunrises, sunsets, thunderstorms — always colourless.

Eventually, he told his wife. It took a good while to explain. She nodded, then she held him, but Mark thought she never really understood. On the other hand, he didn’t really expect her to. But she was there with him waiting through all the CAT scans, and MRI scans, and meeting different people in all sorts of different lab coats pronouncing “psychosomatic” in all sorts of different ways, and the ophthalmologist almost poking Mark’s eye out by accident — “I swear it never happened to me before” he said, without a hint of apology — and all the other things that took months, but ultimately led nowhere. Mark’s sky remained gray and no one knew why.

He got used to it over time, or so he thought. In the first weeks, he looked down when walking outside, ashamed or maybe disappointed, but eventually he realized it’s not something that would be hard to hide from others. So he started holding his head up and pretending everything was okay.

Sometimes Jennifer tried to describe a particular day’s hue to him, but sensed his uneasiness about the subject, so she stopped. She would still, once in awhile, on a particularly beautiful day, take the camera he abandoned, and take a photo of the sky. She hoped that he would enjoy the pictures once his predicament was over. Except now she did it all in secret.

But, some weeks later, on one universally gray morning, she shouted excited as Mark walked down for breakfast: “I just read this article in the newspaper. They were talking about how languages evolve, and how in ancient Greece, they could describe only a few colours. They didn’t have names we use today for many of them.”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“Homer, for example, never called the sky blue,” she added.

“Do you mean that I should be glad? Some people never saw a blue sky in their life, or couldn’t describe it, but I did and I can at least still reminisce and talk about it?”

“No, that’s… that’s not what I… I just thought — it’s your sky, only your sky now. You could invent a new name for your colour… And I could use it too.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said with harshness in his voice that surprised even him. “There’s a name for it already. It’s gray, just gray.” He sighed and then added, much more quietly, “You know what, I don’t really care anymore. It’s just a stupid sky.”

She looked up at him, more worried than offended, but he was already on his way out. He put on his gray coat, picked up his gray briefcase, opened the door, and left for work.