monochrome

in #story6 years ago

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A few years ago, I was out with some friends of mine. As is normally the case when you are out with your friends, we were at a restaurant inside one of the city's more inconspicuous (at the time) malls—the kind of mall you'd pass by without much thought, since the building itself was quite dull and grey, back then, what with the many rows of wooden (somewhat rotten) scaffolding still present in front of the glassy bluish windows.
It was almost as if the builders were expecting the structure to fall down any minute. That was probably why most (sane) people didn't visit it too often, save us angsty teenagers: brash, loud fifteen-year-olds that we were. Three years ago, the only places on the first floor of that mall we frequented were a McDonald's and a Westside outlet. The latter was of no interest to me; I was there only for the food. Eventually, after my endless pestering—as well as the embarrassingly ear-splitting stomach rumbles a few of my classmates discharged—we ended up at McDonald's, and promptly stuffed ourselves with burgers and soda. It would be safe to say that McDonald's was the default obsession of our entire batch, mostly because it was so close to school.
At this point, I began eating the ice cubes left over inside my glass, one by one, not unlike a giraffe thoughtfully chewing acacia leaves, contemplating its existence. Understandably, my friends all turned their heads toward me:
"Are you alright?"
I gazed back, perplexed, forgetting about my cold fingers for a moment.
"Why are you eating the ice?"
"Er—doesn't everyone?" I glanced around the room, waiting for something earth-shattering to happen, so that the glare of the spotlight burning my corneas could focus itself somewhere else instead. The spotlight, however, was a figment of my imagination: as such, it could not be shifted, much like my classmates' attention. After a few seconds (they really did feel like an eternity) of slightly invasive stare downs and uncomfortable shifting in our seats, everyone went back to slurping their drinks, making as much noise as was possible, in an effort to paper over my resentful awkwardness.
That awkwardness persisted until today, when my brother declared with an air of having had another one of his historic epiphanies, "I think you should eat the ice, actually, you've paid for it anyhow." For about two seconds, I was happy that he had come up with such a startling revelation all on his own, then the fiend inside my mind chose to remind me of this particular happenstance, upon which I figured it would be quite nice if I were able to somehow infuse it into this tea-like condensation of thoughts, before it evaporated into oblivious nothingness.
It then occurred to me that not all of us like condensing things. Some might rather weave themselves out like a tapestry, stitching more words in, gradually and slowly, two by two—resembling a continuous spectrum from the outside, when in actuality, they are made up of discrete wavelengths that become clearer as you zoom in. Maybe their tapestries are in monochrome, or in earthy shades and pastel colours.
The somewhat more adventurous ones amongst us might not believe in tapestries at all, choosing instead to stare the world right in the face with its narrow, winding, pitch black alleys and blinding white sunlight. The rest of us prefer to delude ourselves into looking at everything through rose-coloured glasses. Glasses, too, are not always rose-coloured; they can be blue, for instance. Maybe someone has dark blue glasses, navy blue ones, almost like the colour of the evening sky; for them, it would always be night. Speaking of the night, some of us associate it with silence, and conversations with longer pauses than clauses; others might think of loud music, parties, drinks spilling over, and shattering glass.
Some may love oversimplification (however inadequate it may be)—to distill paragraphs into small, unbreakable sentences: to encapsulate; others might want to adorn their writings with flowery descriptions and icy metaphors—but there are also people I've met who reside somewhere in between. It would be quite unappealing if everybody looked, thought, and felt the same. The real challenge, though, would be accepting that each one of us has reasons to believe what we believe in: to not dismiss others’ viewpoints as being the result of some form of bigotry, or inherent prejudice.
After all, not everyone likes eating ice.

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