Grey.
By Soumya Deshpande
As a girl in her early teens, I was an avid reader, mainly literature classics and some random writings on the Internet. I read some works of Dickens, Alcott but mostly, a lot of Dahl (The only writer to present the twisted ways of world in a humorous way while being kid friendly). Back in the days of newly found whatsapp and platforms like quora, tumblr and reddit, I was gradually introduced to the raw (not entirely but to an extent) thoughts of a person and to be honest, I didn’t like them very much.
The literature classics? Yes, they were absolutely wonderful, and I would be able to sense the complex emotions that novelists wished to convey but that was all I could do, just sense, understanding them was way out of reach. As a girl in her early teens, the door to the land of Hope and Happy place was still quite ajar. The world we lived in was a good place after all, bright and full of colours.
The concepts of misery, complications, grey, nothingness, hopelessness still did not exist in the working dictionary of a 13 year old. Things were either good or bad, white or black, there was no limbo, no grey. I would ask questions like “Why would she hurt her if she was just jealous?” and “Why do people say hurtful things to each other?”. No one gave me any real answers, they would just tell me what every kid is told “They are bad people/Bad people do those things.” (things here being talking without filters, wanting to live on your own terms and stuff like that). No one ever really told me what was so “bad” in doing it and mainly “Why” they did what they did.
But at some point, everything changed (of course it would, it always does, right?).
Suddenly, all these words; misery, sorrow, jealousy, loneliness, hopelessness, the grey, frustration and anger had started making sense. The world was not as I thought it to be. The truth had been brought upfront, it was like cutting a wound open, a wound you didn’t even know was there and just leaving it out to bleed. I write “suddenly” yet, somehow, I don’t think it was quite “sudden”, no it was far from it actually, after all these years of enduring life, these emotions were bound to surface sooner or later.
And just like that, it started making sense; being pulled into a dark place, not wanting to be pulled in yet having no energy to walk out.
After all, there’s nothing as simple as black and white. Nothing is how it appears at first, change becomes the only constant. The perception one holds today is the truth of today but tomorrow, who knows. Maybe, that is all there is to this whole shebang of this thing we call “life”, you find your way through one grey, just to stumble into another grey and the whole cycle continues until you’re done. Everything is fucked. Everything is blurred. And it’s all GREY.
