It was a particularly dull and quiet morning; not a speckle of blue in the sky, no ray of sunshine, not even a single bird chirp to signal the awakening of a new day, only gray clouds as far as the eye can see. There were no church bells, sirens in the distance, or the sound of sprinklers nourishing neighboring lawns – too quiet for a Monday in the middle of August. It was as if a blanket of eerie silence had fallen over the entire world, or perhaps just my own. As I drove the roads of my everyday route to school, I didn’t notice the usual morning joggers or the familiar sedans hurrying to get their drivers to work on time. I didn’t notice much of anything at all, besides the tenderness of my puffy, sleep-deprived eyes and the gloominess of the weather. I arrived at school, parked in between two gray cars, and walked toward the big, dark green doors at the front of the school entrance. I entered the hallway—composed entirely of gray tiles on the floor and gray painted walls—and was greeted by my first period teacher, a bald man with a muscular stature and neatly trimmed, gray facial hair. He began to speak to me and I nodded although my mind had traveled to the pattern of my morning’s events, each involving one consistent factor: the color gray.

During the first week of school, I roamed through the gray halls and stairwells paying no attention to my peers. I rarely engaged myself in any form of conversation, except for the half smile and insincere thank-yous I gave to anyone offering their condolences to me. I was a living, breathing zombie with a hatred for just about anything or anyone that crossed my path. All I wanted was to have my old life back, to somehow escape the grayness and re-enter my once-colorful world. The world before these scary thoughts I became too familiar with, the world I so innocently lived in without a single ounce of worry, the world I knew before cancer had consumed my mother and taken her right before my very eyes. I wondered if anyone had noticed a difference, but I quickly realized that was not possible because cancer was a completely foreign idea in the innocent lives of teenagers residing in the “perfect” community of my high school.

I envied the innocence of those suburban living teenagers. I envied the simple fact that most of them had both a mom and a dad. I could not fathom the idea that others could move on while my life was completely frozen over by the devil himself: Cancer. But most of all, I envied the vibrant colors I watched effortlessly flow out of every single one of those naïve teenagers; their laughter painted vivid portraits of bliss on their canvases of ignorance, while I solemnly stood in the background holding up my lifeless crumbled up piece of gray paper. I’m not one to wish negativity upon others but when I saw everyone else as a box of Crayola crayons while I was a pencil, I wished nothing more than to shove those crayons into an electric sharpener.

I spent so much time wishing that everyone else could feel my pain that I began to drown within my sea of despair, which only made me want to sink their boat and have everyone drown with me. The hatred continued until I had a visit from my angel one night. And then it occurred to me, the issue wasn’t those around me moving on, it was me letting grief engulf me, turning me gray piece by piece until there was barely any pigment left in my once-colorful soul.