Life as colour…
Into the grey
This short piece is one of two that originate in a literary challenge to tell a story through a colour. It is based on real people and their relationships.
GREY is in-between. Neither black nor white, it is a compromise. It holds a bit of both extremes. It is less colour than the absence of colour. Grey exists between the poles of black and white, yes and no, positive and negative. It is where most of us live our lives.
That summer the grey of Rusty’s life titled towards the lighter, positive side of grey. That was because of May. Rusty had known May for perhaps the best part of a year but maybe it was a little less than that. May would come to this place in the city that Rusty frequented. There they had remained friends, occupying that mid-grey space somewhere between acquaintances and close friends.
Rusty doesn’t remember when the greyscale tilted, but tilt it did. May and Rusty were now more than friends in the casual way of the times. They now shared that light grey part of the spectrum. Then, further tilting to a lighter grey saw them decide, in a casual sort of way, to share the same room in an inner city sharehouse. The greyness became lighter and the months passed.
It was in less than a year, though, when Rusty realised there was an even lighter shade of grey in the form of the slim young blonde woman from an upper-middle class suburb who lived in the room below. They had briefly shared a temporary zone of lightish greyscale a couple years before they went their own ways into the greyness of life.
Suddenly it seemed, May’s and Rusty’s shared position on the greyscale upended and took up position far over to the darker tones. But two portions on the greyscale cannot be simultaneously occupied, so that of Rusty and the slim blonde woman became a lighter grey. They threw in their lot together in a state and city far distant from that where they had lived their mutually pale shade of grey. Just after that, May’s dark grey turned to a glowing light colouration when she took up with a mutual friend of her and Rusty and went into replication mode.
And so it went. For both of them the greyscale would once again tilt to a dark grey tone and then back to a lighter colouration. That would happen with the passage of time, much of which was spent in the middle-grey zone of the monochromal spectrum.
“So, that’s your theory of grey then,” May says to Rusty as she tilts her head back to drain the last of the coffee in the cup.
“So, where does that leave us now? Are we in the mid-grey reaches or are we somewhere to the lighter grey end?”.
“I’d put us in the lighter tones,” Rusty replies. “But a lighter tone with a rosy tint to it. And that’s because neither of us want to reoccupy that other light grey we occupied in the past. That’s too troublesome, too unpredictably likely to tilt towards a darker shade of grey. I think we’re both beyond that now.”
So it was that day, in that little downtown cafe, that the shades of greytone were evened out and a new tonation of grey, this one with a light tone with a faint rosy glow, set them on a path that resolved their colour confusion forever.
