I found a writing prompt online that intrigued me. I tried to keep it short. This could easily go much longer with more details. Let me know what you think:
I used to enjoy sunsets. In fact, they were my favorite part of the day. I loved watching the sun, a ball of blazing red- orange, sink into the horizon while the clouds shifted and swirled in various shades of pinks and purples and oranges. When I close my eyes, I can almost see the colors in my mind. Almost, but not quite. Not anymore. It’s been so long, I can’t quite remember them anymore.
My soul mate died nearly twelve years ago, but I can remember the day we met like it was yesterday. I had already stowed my carry-on bag in the overhead bins, as the flight attendants repeatedly told everyone, and was settling into my window seat. A woman with nearly black hair in a white shirt and long loose white skirt with big gray flowers printed on it slid down into the aisle seat next to me. “I can’t wait to relax on the beach and soak up the sun, I’m so tired of winter,” she said to me with a smile. I intended to politely respond. I really did. But when I looked up to answer, her eyes caught me off guard. They were a bright, piercing…….color. What was the name of that color? I had never seen it before. Hadn’t seen ANY color before actually. I just stared.
“Something wrong?” she asked, her smile faltering.
I stammered “Your….it’s just…..I’ve never believed the stories but, your eyes. They aren’t….gray.”
She knew which stories I meant. Everyone heard them when we were little: everyone on earth has a soul mate and when you meet your soul mate, you gain the ability to see in color. Until then, you merely see black, white and grays. Some people believe in the tales so whole-heartedly that they spend their lives searching for their soul mate. Some even claim to have found them and try to convince others by describing things they could suddenly see. But most people brush off the stories as just that: stories. My parents were non-believers. So I was raised in the mindset that soul mates don’t exist and color was a fairy tale. And yet, here I was, staring into the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen and they were most definitely color.
Over time, as we got to know each other, and grew closer, I saw more and more colors. I found a book that listed colors and their names and we learned them together. So many different shades of green in the trees, lemon yellow, purple flowers. Neither of us ever really knew how beautiful the world was before, when we only saw shades of gray. My favorite color was the blue of her eyes. We spent 5 years exploring and rediscovering the world we thought we had known.
Then it all changed. She was in a car accident. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital. When I arrived, they were still working on her. She had lost so much blood. As I watched, the blood faded from red to a dark, shiny gray, and I knew. They hadn’t given up yet, but I knew she was gone. I looked around me and saw that everything was again just black, white, and shades of gray. And I cried.
I go to her grave every year on her birthday. I bring her a bouquet of flowers. She loved flowers. They grew in all sorts of colors. I’m never sure what color flowers I’ve brought. I haven’t seen any color since she died. Until today. As I placed the bouquet on her headstone, I realized one tulip was pink.
