Shades of Grey

I wonder when it was, that you lost your ability to dream...

Benjamin is six years, five months, and four days old when he loses colour.

It happens in the park, when he stumbles upon a group of boys who have done what little boys sometimes do"they have discovered an injured bird, and in their curiosity, have become cruel tormentors.

Benjamin can see by the bird’s movements, the frantic flap of flightless wings and scrabble of useless talons, just how terrified and pained it is as they prod and manipulate it. One boy drops a rock, and the bird goes still. To Benjamin, it is no longer a bluejay, vibrant against hard, brown earth, but a grey-washed collection of feathers and tissue. The tiny trickle of dark liquid against the ashen ground shines more than its eyes.

At first, he doesn’t understand what happened, why his world suddenly flickers from a technicolour riot into a bewildering landscape of greys, white on black. He has only the image of now crumpled grey feathers, once a deep, swirling blue. He finds himself stepping backwards slowly, and away from the other children, discombobulated.

He returns home to his family, and his mother, once soft, and golden, clutches him to her chest and cries. Her fingers thread through his dark hair as she mourns the lost innocence of her child. Benjamin doesn’t understand why she’s upset, but he lets her hold him in silence.

What he learns later, from his older brother Michael, is that all children experience this at some point, that moment when innocence is shattered; hope and magic are replaced with a monochromatic reality, stark in its rendering. His brother is not so poetic, however, and merely smiles a cold, reptilian smile, as he says, “Welcome to the real world, little brother.”

Benjamin doesn’t seem to notice the sadness lurking behind his brother’s irises.

He only then begins to wonder how long it’s been since his brother began seeing in black and white. He doesn’t think he wants to know.

Years pass, and Ben finds he has experienced a variety of the cruelties offered by the world; his mother passes, and when her skin is no longer soft and warm, he finds himself wishing he remembered what her eyes used to look like, full of swirling green and gold. It’s not fair that the closest thing he had to colour has been taken away from him as well. He is faced with the deep wheals of rejection and the sharp stab of humiliation from his peers as he realizes just how outcast he is. By the time he reaches his late twenties, and has survived high school and university, he has built his walls high and thick in order to keep the world and its two-toned pain away.

His brother stares into his eyes, which he’s sure were once green like their mother’s, and finds himself mourning the child he used to know. The man he sees instead is hardly recognizable, beaten down by the cruelty of the world. He fears that Benjamin has become so afraid of others breaking him that he has broken himself.

It isn’t until Benjamin reaches his thirties that he meets Laurel Stoppard.

He’s a doctor now, so preoccupied with fixing others that he can’t seem to tend to the wounds he has himself. It’s almost the end of his shift, and he is prodding softly at a darkened patch of skin on a patient’s arm. When his colourblindness hinders his ability to analyze the wound properly, he sighs, and sits back.

He pauses a moment, squinting slightly at the confused patient, when two things happen: the door to the room quietly slides open, a voice says, “Oh God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know you had a patient.” and a riot of cream and blue-black and violet, of sickly yellow-green and florid red explode across the woman’s arm, garish and grotesque.

The suddenness, the violence of this detonation, sends him reeling, twists his stomach hard as he turns to inspect the newcomer.

The woman is compact, but her skin"her skin is tanned, olive fading to a wintry pallor. Benjamin doesn’t know if there are adequate words in the whole of the English language to name this woman’s hair, at once blonde and brown and laced with the first streaks of silver. Her eyes are a deep, navy blue, beset with both laugh-lines and frown-lines, a thousand subtle shades he hasn’t seen on flesh since he was six years old.

Immediately he knows. He knows deep down in the most secret, walled-off chambers of his figurative heart, that his mother’s hopes had been right after all.

“There’s still hope Darling,” she’d whispered to him. “You can still find beauty in the world again.”

He can feel those barriers crashing down within him, crumbling like plaster, eroded in a current of I’ve finally found it, I’ve finally got it back. He doesn’t know if it’s some euphoric relief, or the way his stomach clenches and his head pounds with the visual overload, but tears well up in his eyes at the overwhelming burst of vibrancy.

Both his patient and the woman are staring at him in confusion, but he can’t stop himself from running outside into the passing rain. Sunshine bursts through the clouds, and an array of colour fans its way across the sky in an elegant dance.

Benjamin realizes then that he hasn’t seen a rainbow since he was six years old.