Colorful As White

A touching story offers readers a feeling of coziness and sisterly love

When I was little, I always loved watching my sister paint. She would create the most realistic snow capped mountains and the rustiest torn down barns. I would sit next to her and watch her create whole worlds with just a few flicks of her palm. She would give me a blank canvas, and tell me to draw anything I wanted. I hated seeing that blank canvas, it was just a square of nothing, so I would paint streaks of color everywhere. Turquoise, maroon, magenta. Off they went, covering every corner of that ugly blankness. 

I remember talking to my sister, asking her what her favorite color was. It was white. My sister had the ability to create anything she wanted with all these wonderful colors, and she liked white the most? I remember thinking about this hard. I couldn’t understand it.

She passed a year ago, and at her funeral, I remember seeing all this color floating into the sky. Every color you could possibly imagine created a big beautiful blurred rainbow. It was blinding, so I ran away. My parents found me a while later, and asked what had happened. I just told them that I wasn’t feeling well. How could they see the truth? They could never possibly understand how colorful my sister was. And now it is all gone. Replaced with nothing. Just white.

I saw rainbows in my dreams every night after my sister died. They would swirl and create endless black holes of happiness. I would watch them consume life in my dreams, and I knew that all the trees and little critters that were swallowed into the rainbows would be gone forever, but in a better place. They would be happy.

But that was a long time ago. I stopped dreaming a long time ago. These days, I work in an office from 9 to 5, and

Overtime, I’ve come to realize that my sister is as colorful as white. 

Author's Note

This work is published on https://idleink.org/2022/06/04/colorful-as-white-by-hannah-zhang/ in 6/4/2022