My blogging friend, Eve (Pen&Key) recently wrote a tumblr-inspired soulmate AU in which the whole world is black and white until you meet your soulmate, and I love these so much that I decided to write my own! It's very long (over 2000 words long, to be specific), so I hope you don't mind that, but I enjoyed writing it ^.^
♥
There
was what my sister would describe as a “grey sky” looming over me that morning
as I left my apartment. I supposed Lauren would know what that looked like, having
met her soulmate at the tender age of seven (!!) - a boy named Alex. Nine years
later, and they were still inseparable. Some of us are just lucky, I guess. I
wouldn’t know what a grey sky looked like – everything seemed grey to me. Every
sky, tree, house, face, dress and street remained the same colour in my eyes,
wherever I went.
I was
wearing my black skinny jeans paired with my navy blue duffel coat. Lauren was
always telling me that I should dress in brighter colours, but I didn’t see the
point. It was hardly as if I was going to appreciate them. I was more worried at the idea of my soulmate than the absence of colour in my life, or even the
question all the girls my age seemed to be asking: Will I ever find The One? Sometimes I wondered whether I really
wanted to meet my soulmate. What if he was a creep, or rude, or an idiot? What
if fate messed up and I ended up hating him? I didn’t think I could have coped.
Either
way, I knew that some people could go their entire lives without meeting their
soulmates – my mum being one of them. Neither mine nor Lauren’s dad had been
her soulmate, and although I knew she tried her best to hide her hurt, I could always tell how it really made her feel. I saw the look on her face
when Lauren tried to show her a painting she’d made in school and she couldn’t
tell whether it was of a blue bird or a robin, and the flash of pain in her
eyes every bonfire night as people gazed in awe at the explosions of colour in
the sky. The absence of colour served as a constant reminder of her loneliness.
As a child, every time I saw that look on her face, I swore to myself that I
would never let myself become consumed by the search for my soulmate. Not just
because he could have been anywhere in the world, dead, or in the arms of
another, but because I did not ever want to end up like my mother, awash with
the dim grey of despair that had been her life for forty-eight years.
I had to
be the only eighteen-year-old in the country who hadn’t signed up to at least
one soulmate meeting agency. There were hundreds out there, advertisements for
them bombarding TVs and billboards. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people
of all ages, waiting for the flash of colour that awaited them upon first
laying eyes on The One. They said that when you met them, it was like two
halves of a person coming together to make a whole, like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle connecting. I personally hated the thought. Who did they think they
were, telling me that I was just one half of a whole, like I wasn’t a complete
human being? If that was what having a soulmate felt like – being half a person
– I was perfectly happy the way I was.
I was on
my way to the park that day, hoping for some inspiration for my artwork. I’m
not going to lie – it’s difficult being an artist when the only colour you know
is grey. It was getting increasingly difficult to become an artist at this
time, as more and more people began to discover colour - partly due to the
modern dating agencies, but I didn’t care. I used coloured pencils in my work,
using them according to the colour I thought the thing might be – I knew trees
were supposed to be green, as well as grass, and the sun was supposed to be
yellow, and my pencils had colour labels on them so that I could tell them
apart. Other than that, I experimented. People like me were criticised often by
the art community, and it was difficult to become successful.
“How can you use colours in your work
when you have such a poor understanding of colour itself?”
“Find your soulmate, and come
back again when you can actually see colour”.
Their words rang through my ears.
As I
walked through the park, I passed mothers pushing their children on swings and
families having picnics on the grass. One mother had a wide book spread across
her lap with her little girl peering over her shoulder.
“And
what happened next, Mummy?” she squealed between mouthfuls of jam sandwich.
Turning
the page, her mother replied, “The kiss awakening her from her hundred year
sleep, she was met with a burst of colour as she laid eyes upon the handsome
prince, and she knew that they were meant to be together. And they lived happily
ever after!”
I kept
walking past the playground to the quiet spot of the park where I usually sat
when I needed peace and quiet. Living in an apartment, my neighbours were often
too noisy for me to concentrate, and there wasn’t another place like this in
the whole city. I sat on the wooden bench, half concealed by the canopy of
leaves above my head – convenient for if it started to rain – and began to
unpack my notebook and pencils. To my right, I had a view of the stream that
ran all the way through the park and to several others across the city, the
clear water rolling over the stones and under the bridge. Not many people came
here, as there was nothing for the children to play on, but to me, the stream,
bridge and still nature made it perfect. I spotted a birds nest perched on a
tree branch just above the stream, and began to sketch.
I don’t
know how long I had been drawing for when I first heard a splashing sound
coming from down the stream, as if something was ploughing through it. It had
begun to rain, yet still I remained dry beneath the layer of leaves above my
head. The splashing was followed by the sound of barking, and later on by
shouts. This was the first time I had ever been disturbed in my spot, and I was
surprised someone had stumbled across it, even if it was just a dog.
“Wait!”
I heard the voice behind it shout, a man’s voice, but he was too late. Before I
was aware of what was happening, a white and grey husky burst through the
canopy, its fur weighed down by a mixture of rain and stream water. I couldn’t
help but laugh at the sopping wet creature bounding towards me, its now flat
tail wagging at a thousand miles a minute.
“Hey!” I
exclaimed, holding my hand out to pet the over-excited creature, though it had
other ideas. I shrieked as the creature about half my size climbed onto my lap
as though it were a puppy, soaking my dry jeans and duffel coat as it licked my
face.
“Rose!
Where are you, you stupid dog?” he man’s voice shouted, though the “stupid”
part sounded more endearing than angry. I saw his Converse pacing around through
the leaves of the canopy, a dog lead trailing behind him in the damp grass.
“She’s
in here!” I shouted back, laughing.
“Thank
you”, I heard him reply as his Converse approached the canopy “I’m sorry for
troubling you, she gets like this sometimes…” His voice trailed off as his gaze
found mine, and the colours around me came to life.
It’s
difficult to describe colours without using the words “red”, “green”, “purple”,
etc. It’s like there was a whole world I had been missing. We both stared at
each other in awe. His face was pale, but it wasn’t white. There were many
different colours mixed in – colours I didn’t have the words to describe yet.
It made his cheeks warm despite the freezing weather and rain, and his hair was
the colour I imagined the sun to be – burning and glowing. Was this what blond hair looked like? His coat was the same colour as the grass beneath his feet
and his trousers were a bright colour, much more vivid than mine… I guessed it
right be red. I looked down at my own clothes. So this was what navy blue
looked like – dark, as it had been before, but there was more to it than that,
other things mixed in.
“Please
tell me I’m not the only one seeing this” he muttered, and I choked out shocked
laughter.
“No, you’re
not”. I looked down at Rose and noticed the colour of her eyes – an icy blue,
startling and bright, very unlike the blue of my coat. She grinned at me, tongue
hanging out, and it’s like I could hear her speaking to me.
You’re welcome, she said, before jumping off my
lap to reunite with her owner. I stood up and walked towards the man, who I now
saw was about my age.
When we
were face-to-face, I said “Your eyes… they’re green. Dark green, like the
leaves”.
“Yours
are brown, I think, a bit like the bark of the trees - but they’ve got loads of different
colours in them too. It’s not just brown, it’s… I- I don’t think I have the
words”, he laughed nervously. With a start, I remembered something, picking up
the notebook from the ground, where it landed after Rose knocked it out of my
hands. His eyes widened.
“Oh God,
I’m really sorry about that. She thinks she’s tiny”.
“It’s fine,
it doesn’t matter now”, I said, waving his concerns away. I looked at my
picture now and realised how wrong I’d been. “It’s just that – look – I drew the
bark the same colour as the leaves. I couldn’t tell the difference”, I said
with a laugh.
“Still,
you’re really good at drawing!” he told me before reaching down to pick up my
box full of pencils, which I had thankfully shut before Rose jumped on me. He
opened them and stared for a second, reading the colour annotations.
“…So
that’s what orange looks like”, he remarked as if it was the most amazing thing
he’d ever seen.
“That's... awesome”. I said, a smile spreading across my face as I looked through the
rainbow of colours lying in the box.
As we
waited for the rain to stop, we learned a bit about each other. He introduced
himself as Aaron and told me that he was in town to visit his brother, who
moved here last year, though he brought Rose along too, as everyone he knew was
scared to look after her on their own. I laughed at that. I told him my name
was Amelia and explained that my sister had found her soulmate at just seven
years old, so I felt as if the pressure was on. I even told him about how I
felt about how cynical I felt about the idea of The One, and for once, wasn’t
looked at like I was crazy.
When I thought about the idea of two halves coming
together to become one person, I did not feel at all like one half of a whole.
When he looked at me, I could not have felt any more complete – like
I was the most whole person he had
ever seen.
For the
next hour or so, we wandered the park side by side with the box of pencils,
pointing out things like the colours of playing equipment and people’s clothes,
matching them to their colours; a man in a bright orange rain coat, a little boy
in yellow wellies. We stopped
one girl and complimented her on her blue hair, and she was so taken-aback she blurted
out “My boyfriend’s hair is green!”
It was
dark by the time we had finished wandering the entire park, and I felt like I
had seen every colour in the world - though I knew that as long as we were
together, there was an infinite amount of them out there, just waiting to be
discovered. He had opened my eyes for the first time in my life, and I knew I
was never going back to black and white.
♥
I don't personally agree with the idea of soulmates, fate and the whole "everything happens for a reason" thing, but I find the idea of soulmates entertaining, and I hope you enjoyed this blog post.
Speak to you soon,
Lucy x
