You took pictures that showed happiness a couple of days ago. Today, you took pictures that conveyed sadness. Now, you conclude that life takes the shape of its container in the form of happy pills and sad bottles.
Tonight, the rain pours apace. You open the windows and decide to read a book. A warm cup of vanilla cappuccino welcomes you and a lazy cat that sits on your lap. You halt for a moment only to look outside how the zephyr becomes tornado in five seconds. It’s getting depressing. The window panes are drenched in saltwater. The air mixes with the sea. So what you did was to revert to reading.
It seems you enjoyed what you were doing. But the vanilla cappuccino was left cold. The cat overslept on the floor. Time had taken its toll on you. You stopped reading as soon as you saw a bookmark halfway what you were doing .It’s a picture of a girl in monochrome.
As you watched her closely, she seemed so alive in your imagination. It’s like an old photograph that you once dug out from a room of cobwebs and detritus.Now you are looking for words to describe. Ineffable. No, that’s what you are right now. You have run out of words. This time, you felt frail as a writer. How come that yesterday you have written a 4000-word passage but tonight you can’t even think of just one word about a B&W photo of a girl that you don’t even know?
As the midnight sang with the rain, you noticed that you appreciate the mellifluous voice of thousand crickets and frogs. The rain showered continuously yet it still stopped out of the blue. Afterwards, you longed to smell the sweet scent of petrichor. It satiated your expectation. You are a pushover. Nature always knows how to satisfy your addiction to an earthly stuff. But still, you stopped from there. You looked again at the picture. Her smile became the cynosure of your eyes. It was really a fetching twinkle. Life came out of your veins. The words such as striking and gorgeous were born from your mouth. As a frustrated writer, you have the penchant of getting lost behind smiles and eyes, so as to find them also.
You let a mondegreen slips in your right ear. It says, “art ache”. But you didn’t feel any woebegone thoughts. If it sounded heart ache from your left ear, it would brew a gust of your past experience.
You focused on her eyes. This time, you can’t take your eyes off from hers. It said something to you without a single word. Before your lips spoke a phrase, her irises absorbed the lights bouncing from the ceiling to the dazzling, brown floor. Then, they threw a candid shot of reality to your face. Yes, eyes do speak! You spotted imperfections in the form of heavy bags under her eyes. But that’s fine. She never wore mascara. But you sensed a storm of second thoughts. She had some doubts on herself. She was an ingenue. But you can’t help it back to review her smile. You altered your hesitations. No, wait. You believed she was a strong woman. She isn’t a girl anymore who will cry over a torn stuffed toy. She won’t cry anymore over a spilled milk.
Her cheeks became the roads of her tears, when stars cannot grant her wish. Some other time, you thought she overslept with no pillows and just blankets. You imagined how she overcame her fears during those niveous nights when she was struggling. Times when she threw herself onto the bed and hoped that tomorrow will just be another day to live.
You didn’t get track of time again. You overlooked her forehead that you surmised was once experiencing small bumps of hardships. Sweat has flown sporadically that tasted sweet and salty at the same time. Despite of that, you admired her confidence with her comely gait. It shone bright like her sleek, black hair that ran to her side and to her back.
You can see how simple she was. Her shirt had no design. There’s a pocket on the left side of her bosom. You assumed she gets easily contented on what she has right now. Smiles have no values and she clearly has the knowledge to use a cheap token to happiness.
“The notion that all colorful things are attractive is wrong. Black and white isn’t ugly. It’s beautiful. It’s meaningful. It’s colorful with its resonating depth and quality.” A thought rippled through your shirt.You’d be honest to say that not all pictures in vivid colors are all good-looking. They can be deceiving even your eyes are fully-opened.
An exquisite serendipity has occurred. You told yourself that the next time you love a girl, you should look at her colored picture and stare to it until you see shades of the rainbow. If ever you don’t see a single coruscate, turn her photo into monochrome. Gray scale gives it a more picturesque and radiant meaning. It reveals her imperfections that you need to love from her. It lets you see how impeccable she is in the eyes of God. God created the colors of rainbow for you to appreciate life and love. But God weaved black and white out of those colors, only for you to see that true beauty is inside and out – that a girl’s flaws are not as black as they appear but as white as they reach the horizons.
R a i n c h a s e r 