I want to be colorful.

But yesterday in art class, I learned that when colors are mixed together in an unconventional way, the white canvas fades into streaks of ugly black smears and is no longer worth anything anymore. Perhaps that is why nobody wants to stray from the crowd of beautiful bright patterns.

I don’t think I am the same shades as everyone else.

Lately I’ve been crawling in grey - grey sheets, grey clothes, and grey skin. My mother purses her lips, scathingly commenting that I look like a ghost. I think: maybe I am a ghost. The rope securing me to sanity has been cut and wrapped around my neck by my own pale shivering hands, leaving me drifting silently between the parallel universes of reality and eternity. I am stuck where the points should have never intersected: not really living, not really dead. I am a grey shell, a ghost of myself.

Blue bags hang despairingly like dirty bruises from underneath my dull eyes. Lack of sleep has inadvertently caused the sickening thoughts I have kept inside to spill out and show in tangible ways, giving me yet another excuse to mock my own body. Blue used to be my favorite color - the color of the sky when it was easiest to breathe. Now, I inhale in rattled breaths. I never realized how difficult it was to breathe until somebody began to mix acid with the rain and pour it down from the clouds. Now, every time I try to look up, the acid fills up my lungs and I turn blue from choking. All I see is piece and piece of my raw heart melting away.

Then, I am beige - boring, unappealing, and the color of my vomit when I am feeling too fat. Nobody pays attention to beige.

But tonight I am fighting a red crusade against myself as my wrists are slowly slit open by a hand that does not feel like my own. The hardest part is the first slash, but once the initial blinding pain hurts so much that my body goes numb, the odd combined taste of iron and sorrow enveloping the air is cathartic. It is as if all the feelings of self-deprecation has trickled out of my body alongside the blood and surged onto floor. I gently trace a pattern of blooming red swirls on the bathroom wall and paint a beautiful sunset of emotions. It is only when I am unable to feel that I am the most happy. For some reason it is comforting to know that the granite tiles are still colder than me.

If there is one color I do not wish to be, it is black: the color of mistakes and of hopelessness. Black is irreversible. But the waves of black disparity come in pulses, beating rhythmically against the shore of my skin, threating to completely obliterate the few colors I have left on my pallet. Now, eyes closed and fists clenched, I realize I am an unconventional rainbow. But the rainbow is slowly fading and the sky denigrates to black.

I am not colorful.
I am an ugly smear.
I am not anything
anymore.