Monotone Dreamer

This is a fictional piece.

I live in a colorless world.

I'm fond of wandering around desolate streets, splashing in clear puddles that shatter apart like glass reflecting the grayscale world that surrounds everything. There is no escaping this place. It simply is, as we simply are.

This is the logic we mustn't defy.

If we question our surroundings and dream of strange colors that taste of spice and sweet, hot and cold, and hard but never solid, bad things will happen. That is what we've been told. Everyone seems to accept this. I can't understand why.

It's disgusting.

This insipid lifestyle grows horribly boring, even if you've only been around for five rotations as I have. Everything looks the same. The buildings, parks, sidewalks, streets…. Even the people are all alike. I hate it. This scheme of things that is our life for eternity smells like molding sewage and like something that's too salty for anyone to eat. It's not sour or sweet. It's not sticky, and it doesn't fill you up with a sensation of needing and wanting and existing for a reason.

I want to run away.

Tall brick walls that are the same sort of boring tones surround our city. There is no break in the monotony of our everyday life, and we are expected to accept this way of living without question. I cannot. I will not bring myself to fall to the level of those who have had hope and light and warmth and joy drained from them. That would be too sad. Those people are too sad. This is a desolate city filled with melancholic hearts that have near given up. Soon, these people will falter and everything will collapse. Soon, these chained souls will be released and free to swallow everything that doesn't exist in this limited place.

One day, we'll be free.

For the sake of this city, I will continue to dream and preach about tasty things to both sight and taste that lay outside the walls. Even if no one believes, and even if I have to stand alone, I will continue to have faith in other things that must exist elsewhere besides the inner workings of my mind. It cannot be that everywhere is the same as this place we are now. That would be too pitiful of an existence. But even if there isn't anything else out there, I will continue to hope and pray and create and draw and describe and find a way to let everyone try a drop of the tangy bittersweet hard and chewy things that I believe in. And with that, even if we're stuck in this dejected world without ever tasting that spicy and sweet, hot and cold, hard but never solid, unforgettable but easily forgotten treat…

I will paint the world.

Photo by: Albireo