You only see black and white and gray ... until you touch your soulmate.
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The world was… gray.
Gray, and white and black. Faded in some places, and in others smudged, much like when you’re drawing using soft oil pastels and you accidentally run your hand across a colored part and it spreads throughout the drawing. Just like that. Trees? Gray smudges against white and faded gray skies. Hands? Solid gray, shadows black, faint white. It’s always been like that.
Everything in pale, stale, colorless grayscale.
It’s not all like that though, how else would other people tell you such vivid stories about how wonderful the trees looked -- they called the color “green” and the sky “blue”. Terms so foreign…
Everything in gray… until you meet someone who’ll make the color burst into every little nook and cranny. Make everything bleed with it. One touch is all it takes. One touch out of billions of others. How… beautifully frustrating and innocent.
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Jennie was late, late, late, late, and she knows this wasn’t good. Not when she had an important meeting with someone who was offering her a ticket out of this hellhole.
She fumbled with her shoes, while keeping her phone sandwiched in her hands along with countless other things she needs for the day. Laptop? Check. Wristwatch, very important, Check. Presentation? Double check. Keys? Wait… keys… where were her goddamned keys?
Jennie goes over the door side table, picking up the potted plant, hoping to find the spare key underneath.
Nothing…
Great…
She takes a quick glance at her watch and she sees, give or take twenty minutes she could spare. Twenty minutes, twenty-minutes…. Jennie bites her bottom lip and jogs to the door.
Keys be damned, Jisoo has some explaining to do when she gets home.
Jennie calls for a cab and prays to non-existent Gods, he’s a crazy ass driver, and prays even more for traffic to be non-existent. Tough luck though.
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Jennie loved drawing, loved the feeling of running her pencil against the paper, watching it go round and round as she tried to draw a tree. Loops make for great leaves, don’t question it. She scribbles little loops, round and round until they fill the tree.
“That looks beautiful Jennie.” Ms Chaeyoung’s praise was always her favorite. She’d sit right at the front after recess just so she’d see her drawings. She liked it when her art teacher saw more than what others failed to see in her. That she was good too.
“Why don’t you use this one…” Jennie looked at the curious thing in front of her, because when you’re five years old and curious, everything’s curious too.
She takes the small stub from her teacher’s hands and looks at the thick gray pencil?
“It’s an oil pastel, you can use it to fill the leaves here.” Jennie follows her slender fingers as she traces over Jennie’s loops, “It’s the color of the leaves -- green” She smiles, and Jennie smiles back.
“Green?” Jennie looks back at the pastel in her hands, “but… they all look the same..”
“They do, for now…” Rosie, as the other students called her, sat beside her. Cradling her chin in her hands as she looked at Jennie’s drawing. “In time, you’ll see there are far more beautiful colors out there, aside from gray.”
