Nothing but Gray

At first, nobody really noticed. It was little things. A stop sign looked kind of off, like it had been sitting in the sun too long. A little faded, maybe.

People shrugged it off. Bad paint. Weird lighting. Not a big deal. Life kept moving.

Then the strawberries turned gray.

I was the first one in my house to actually say it out loud.

“These don’t look right,” I said, holding one up.

It looked like a strawberry, but it wasn’t. No red at all. Just this dull gray that made it feel fake, like a prop. My mom didn’t even turn around.

“They’re fine.”

“They’re not red.”

“You’re overthinking it", she snapped.

But I wasn’t. I remembered. Within a week, red was gone. Not faded, just gone. Stop signs turned blank. Roses looked dead even when they were fresh. Someone cut their hand at work, and even that wasn’t right. No red. Just dark gray. That’s when people started to panic. The news threw out explanations, chemicals, mass hysteria, problems with our eyes. Everyone had some theory. None of it helped.

Then orange disappeared. The sunsets were the worst. I remember standing outside, watching the sky slowly drain, like someone was turning a dial down until there was nothing left. People gathered just to watch it happen. Nobody talked much. It felt like a funeral.

“It’ll come back,” someone said.

It didn’t. After that, it didn’t stop.

Yellow went next. And everything felt quieter. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. Like color had a kind of noise to it, something we never noticed until it was gone.

That’s when I started writing things down. Not what was disappearing, but what I remembered. Sunflowers are bright. Too bright, almost. Lemons feel like summer. My dad’s favorite shirt looks like early morning. I didn’t want to lose it. Because people already were.

“That’s not right,” my little brother said one night, flipping through my journal.

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not,” he said. “Grass was never that color.”

“It was green,” I told him.

He just stared at me. “What’s green?”

That scared me more than anything.

Green disappeared. Trees looked dead, even when they weren’t. Fields turned empty. The world felt hollow. People stopped going outside. What was the point?

Blue lasted longer than the others. I held onto that one. Every morning, I’d go outside and just look at the sky, trying to memorize it, the color, the feeling, how big it seemed. I wrote about it constantly. Blue feels like freedom. Blue is calm. Blue is everything that isn’t heavy. And then one morning, it was gone.

The sky wasn’t dark. It wasn’t cloudy. It was just nothing. That’s when everything really started to fall apart. Without blue, the world felt smaller. Like something was pressing down on us.

After that, the rest didn’t take long. Indigo. Violet. Gone.

All that was left was gray.

Time stopped making sense after that. Days blurred together. Nights didn’t feel any different. I stopped writing. I wasn’t even sure my memories were right anymore. One night, I sat by my window, flipping through my journal. The colors I’d drawn didn’t look real anymore. Was the sky actually that bright? Was grass really alive like that? Or had I just made it all up?

I picked up a pencil. For the first time in a while, I tried to draw something. Not from memory. Just something new. I closed my eyes and imagined a color that had never existed, not red, not blue, nothing we had lost, something else.

When the pencil touched the paper, I saw it. At first, I thought I was imagining it. But it was there. Faint. Unsteady. But not gray. I froze. Then I kept going. And it grew stronger. I didn’t know what to call it, but it felt alive. The next morning, people showed up at my house. Word spreads fast when there’s nothing left to talk about. They stood there, staring at the page in my hands. “What is that?” someone asked. “I don’t know,” I said. And I meant it. “But it’s not gone.” Nobody said anything after that. They just kept looking. At something impossible. At something new. And for the first time in a long time, I smiled. Not because things were going back to normal, but because maybe they weren’t supposed to.