On Days Like These
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Robyn Le, Grade 12
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Short Story
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2017
Sometimes you wake up with black-tinted glasses over your eyes. It twists your world upside down and inside out. You become so focused on why’s it so dark that you forget that it’s even there. It becomes like a grayscale; a mosaic of blacks and greys, inexplicably blurred. It’s lost its meaning. But yet you try to find something, something that makes sense to you within it. It may be twisted and contorted, so out of place and out of time. Yet you can’t help it, to latch onto it. Desperate to feel. Desperate to live. Desperate to escape.
And other times, you wake up with blue-tinted glasses over your eyes. Your heart aches with the longing of meaning, meaning that it doesn’t know. The world around you embraces you with its cool caresses and gentle breezes. It must be a sign surely, that it’s opening up to you, trying to let you know that it’s going to be there for you. Lets you know that most importantly, that it’s going to take you wherever you want to go. To find what your heart is trying to find.
And on some days, there are green-tinted glasses framed over your eyes. Something ugly twists in your stomach. It rears its ugly and monstrous head backwards before it dives in for the kill. The kill. Them. You try to squash it down, telling it that it’s wrong. It doesn’t need to be there, but it is. With both hands you force it down, you try to make it go away. It refuses. It doesn’t back down. Instead it spreads. Into your heart. Into your soul. Into your mind. And that’s where it plants its seeds. Sown into your thoughts. That’s when it has truly won.
And on these days, your yellow-tinted glasses are covering your eyes. Everything feels so light. You’re floating on the air and breathing in the sunshine. It sends warmth and little tingles down your spine. You laugh softly, the sound leaping across the space, doing the most complex tumbles and turns along the way. It feels so right, soaking in these feelings of balance and the strong earth under your feet. And even if the world is off-kilter at times, you turn with it, going along with the most absolute ease.
And on days like today, you wake up and all you see is white. It feels mundane. Time digs in its heels and refuses to move forward. But it does. Because that’s what it’s supposed to do and there’s definitely going to a big problem when it stops. It still looks so bland and so white. Then hints of blue begin to seep in. It begins to shift and twist into yellow. Then green. And then red and purple and other shades and then black. Suddenly it’s white again and then it continues. It’s disorienting and it’s hard to predict and it’s so incredibly frustrating. But that’s okay isn’t it? It’s temporary.
It’s life.