My eyes aren’t closed but I see nothing. Black. Or white. Or grey. I don’t know. I don’t remember these colours. What are these colours? I know that red is for love and orange is fire. But can one know love if they know not red? Can one know fire if they know not orange?

If this is so, I may never know anything at all.

The snowflakes, white as anything, whirl lazily outside the window against the backdrop of the pearly morning sky. But they can only be seen through the upper part of the window - beyond this, a crystal army spiderwebs across the glass, armed so sharply that even my imagination daren’t cross it, lest it be impaled upon icy spears.

Against the far wall a shelf of books sit silent. They also once comforted me, offered me refuge from these miserable walls of grey. Once they whispered tales for me, from lands distant and close by, but now they’ve turned away. Now, they have succumbed to the silence, fallen prey to a silence as black as pitch.

Light floods through the window, blinding white light, slanting across the floor, trying to dispel the shadows, not quite succeeding, illuminating the fingers of pale dust reaching out, creeping into my nose, my throat, my lungs. This white light does nothing but remind me of the light there once was, lights of red, lights of orange. Lights which have gone, never to return. Lights that call, but never are they quite answered, for their voices are absorbed by this terrible white light, and never reach me.

With the whiteness and the blackness and the greyness comes the cold. Like icy fingers wound round my ankles and trailing up my legs, racing up my spine. I shiver. I don’t know why. Because it’s not a tangible sort of cold. Cold. Black. White. Grey…


All around are empty spaces; void, empty spaces, full of shadows. Empty spaces full of shadows, shadows which penetrate the white light; penetrate the black silence; penetrate the intangible cold. They hang there, grey and unmoving, like life gone sour from too long away from colour. Life shattered in one’s hand, slipping deftly between one’s fingers. Life insipid in all its greyness, painting pictures in the night with neither sweet love nor bright fire, but with black, white and grey.