Chapter Text
Miracle Part 1 – Greyscale
See poster and other important images here: https://twitter.com/NuuGuSeYONGE/status/1433736076229701632
What time is it?
The light grey 2 numbers on the black 2 clock read 9:02.
Damn. I’m late for work.
Seongwoo tossed off the dark grey 1 blanket and slid his legs over the edge of the bed. They were slim, smoothly shaven, colored light grey 1, extremely close to white that it’s almost impossible to distinguish. He felt sluggish. It’s strangely more difficult to wake up as the days of the week went on, as if his energy became slower to recover each weekday that passed.
Why is it so quiet? There’s hardly anyone in suits bustling about the street on their way to work. There’s no traffic with blaring horns, no chatty, laughing children. No line at the bus stop. No dangling warning bells from bikes. Hmm…I must have got the days wrong. It must be Saturday.
He smiled with relief, slipping back to bed. Saturday meant no work. He could get out of bed whenever he wanted, if at all. Covering his thumping heart under the black and white striped pajama shirt, Seongwoo laid back down to sleep some more. He felt so groggy that he drifted off right away.
That didn’t happen on weekdays, but it was common on weekends. Sometimes he spent the entire afternoon buried under the blankets like a hibernating squirrel. He liked how the world was under the covers. It was silent, peaceful, comforting, cozy.
There, he didn’t have to deal with people. He didn’t need to bite his tongue, holding back annoyance at all the noise from the hustle and bustle of society. He didn’t need to be polite or pretend to care about pointless things people at work conversed about. Behind his eyes, it was black, just like everyone else. That was the only time that he was on equal footing as other humans. Although he saw life differently than they did, when humans closed our eyes, they see the same world – total darkness unless we imagine something.
He could dream and he could imagine things, even colors that he had never seen. He had some idea of how colors were meant to make you feel, which allowed him to picture them in him dreams. He made his own associations based on emotions that he’d experienced in life. Though he had no way of knowing if his guesses were correct since he had never seen colors beyond monotone shades.
He didn’t even have family members to teach him about colors, not even the various names (apparently there was a lot more than the ten shades he could distinguish with his odd eyes). He knew the names of the colors for the ones he could clearly distinguish the difference – black, white, and grey. He was not a creative person but rather a logical one that liked routines, sequences, and numbers. He simply named them by numbers of intensity.
White, light grey 1, light grey 2, light grey 3, grey, dark grey 1, dark grey 2, dark grey 3, black 1 (slightly opaque), black 2(thick). This was his greyscale or monotone palette, as privileged people who saw colors would say. They were more special than that to him because they were his entire world.
(See the link up top for an image of these ten shades in Ong's greyscale)
Seongwoo grew up in an orphanage. He didn’t know his parents, if they still existed and he wasn’t some sort of misplaced alien. For some reason, he wasn’t adopted. Probably because he was a dull, quiet person without any particular talents. Other kids in the orphanage called him Plain White because that matched his personality, clothes, and skin perfectly. He was a boring person inside and out.
It took him a couple of years to realize that he saw the world abnormally. A teacher in elementary asked him to choose his favorite color from some pencils she was giving them as a gift and he told her that they all looked the same, so he couldn’t. He was taken to the doctor after the teacher realized he wasn’t joking and they performed a color test on the young boy for the first time. He couldn’t differentiate the numbers accurately from the circle of dots.
He learned then that he was color blind, possibly something called a ‘mono’. At that time, he didn’t have a way to look up what that term was, but it had an ominous ring to it. The orphanage kept it a secret, figuring it will affect his chances of getting adopted. He didn’t need to do research to understand that it was considered some sort of incurable illness, something people didn’t want in their gene pool.
It made sense after that why his family would have abandoned their three-year old baby boy. They must have found out while playing around with him that he couldn’t distinguish colors like normal babies. That he was dysfunctional, an abomination. They didn’t want the difficulties of raising a disabled freak nor to be blamed by their families for not bearing a perfect child.
That event and the way adults reacted stuck with the orphan through his teenage years. It was sharp to deduce that he should make sure to keep this a secret. At a young age, he gave the colors he could recognize self-created names. Then, he brainstormed and practiced ways that he could live without having his illness (or disability, he wasn’t sure how it was classified) detected. From listening to others and reading, he learned around seven commonly mentioned colors and many objects that were classified by those colors.
He also learned about the emotions they represented. Nature colors were brown and green, for example. Brown was the color of the earth and branches, similar to what he saw as dark greys. Green was the color of the grass and leaves, similar to shades of light grey in his eyes, it depended on the species of plant. Normal people saw the sun as yellow or orange, but it was a blinding white that made him squint, even more intense than the lights in a house. The sky was apparently a light shade of blue with white clouds, but the colors were too similar for him to clearly distinguish. The sky was simply light grey 1 or white in his eyes.
A common and popular color in the world was blue, followed by red. There were many things in these colors. All forms of water were shades of blue as long as you stood away from it. If you touched it or put it in a container, it appeared colorless, as in transparent. There were a lot of fruits and vegetables which were red, many that were green as well. Seongwoo bet they tasted and smelled even sweeter when you could see their color, so for many years he was curious and envious of color-seeing people when he ate.
Everything he ate was a shade of grey, but at least he could taste and smell. Those senses were heightened, in fact. As if his insatiably curious brain made up for lacking in one aspect. He had the sensitive nose of a dog and the tongue of a chef.
Things are what they are. Things will be as they’re meant to be. Life is what it is. So, don’t fight it. Don’t deny it. Most definitely, don’t fret about it. That’s a waste of your limited energy.
This was a sort of motto that was consistently present in the back of his mind. It became deeply engraved in his character as he grew up repeating it whenever he was having difficulties with his unfortunate situation. In the midst of stuffing down those harmful, unnecessary negative emotions into a covered pit. He later learned he’d covered that pit with some sort of thick armor that also served as a trap, but he needed that to survive.
He couldn’t shut down every single emotion since he was a human with a functioning limbic system, but he needed to tone them down or tune them out. Because emotions made people act irrationally and trust the wrong people who tricked and hurt them. Emotions were dangerous when they got out of control, even more so for people like himself with a huge secret.
He tried to accept the way his life was, the way he was born. After he accepted it, he started the process of trying to like that. By the time he was an adolescent, he wasn’t to the point of liking it, but he’d achieved neutrality. He was fine with it because it was what he was comfortable with.
It was okay that he didn’t have family. It was okay that he didn’t have close friends. It was okay that he didn’t know colors. It was okay living alone and lying to protect himself under a veil of mystery. It was okay that he’d never dated. It was okay that he didn’t know what love felt like. It was okay that he wouldn’t produce. It was okay that he’d die alone. Everything was okay. It needed to be because it couldn’t be any other way.
Although Seongwoo was fine with it now, he most certainly didn’t want to pass this rare disability down. He could handle it because he’d always been independent and strong mentally. He’d often heard from when he was a kid that he was very mature and rational for his age. They said that as if it was a bad, pitiful thing, which he felt was unfair of them. He was a kid without family, come on. He HAD to be. How could he have survived otherwise? He couldn’t afford to be childish. He hadn’t had a single chance to play with friends or depend on any adult.
Seongwoo felt grateful that he was able to receive free education up through public high school while living at the orphanage. His tuition and books were supported from the government, sometimes he had extra funds for new clothes to match his rapidly growing frame. At least he learned early on how to mingle with others and hide his differences until he became an expert. At least he was able to do some sort of work after being old enough in order to have food in his stomach and a roof over his head. At least he was alive, not even just scraping by.
By anyone’s standards, from the outside he seemed to be well-off, upstanding citizen. Everything in his life thus far was okay and that was enough. There were thousands of people in the world who didn’t have that much, so he had no right to wish for more.
Seongwoo slept for two more hours. Then, another hour he spent flipping aimlessly through channels on the TV out of habit. He preferred to watch the news since there was a lot of text and just one person talking at a time. Colors weren’t important there so his mind was at ease. He didn’t need to imagine or pretend anything. It was solid, simple facts, just as he liked. When he watched the news compared to other programs, most importantly, he never felt curious or envious of what colors were shown.
From experience, thinking that way made him feel anxious, so Seongwoo avoided anything that would stimulate that. He stayed away from anything artistic, such as paintings, picture books, and fiction novels. He couldn’t understand them and it that made him frustrated, especially since he had a tendency to over-think if there was some sort of problem. Although they were probably beautiful and made you feel a lot of wonderful ways, he couldn’t hope to experience that. Since he had a color-blind disability with only the concept of those colors being used to tell stories. The only emotions they made him feel were annoyance, self-pity, envy, curiosity, and slight rage.
While growing up, he repeatedly had incidences where he felt that if one of his parents was color blind, then they shouldn’t have reproduced since it was known to be hereditary. They should have thought about their spawn’s future. And they shouldn’t have abandoned him when the inevitable happened. How irresponsible. It would have been better if he hadn’t been born if it was going to be like this. Something terrible could have happened if he wasn’t so strong and smart. If he wasn’t determined to stay alive (although he couldn’t think of a particular reason, he just felt like suicide was losing at a game with the universe which liked to curse people).
He didn’t know his parents, but he resented them, somewhere deep down. He hated them because he didn’t like himself; he didn’t like his strange illness. But he had to accept it because it was stuck with him. There wasn’t any medicine or surgery he’d heard of that would cure it permanently.
It wasn’t until Ong Seongwoo was old enough to live an apartment after he’d graduated from vocational accounting school, working long hours at a desk as an accountant in a small firm, that he had liberty (and courage) to research. The seemingly dangerous word he vaguely recalled that had once been spoken of, ‘mono’, was short for monochrome, a Latin root word for seeing or showing shades of only one color. It was slightly different than color blindness. There wasn’t something wrong with his cones. There was an issue with his brain. An unreachable part of it was not wired correctly.
The colors entered through his cones normally, but his brain couldn’t differentiate them once they got the signals. But there was a way that he could re-wire his brain, temporarily. If he came across his so called ‘probe,’ the person who would poke open those gates, then his brain would be stimulated. He would be able to experience colors, supposedly. The issue was that color-experience using a probe was a temporary fix and the feeling was as wonderful and addictive as drugs, with intense withdrawals when the effects wore off.
When a mono’s world returned to shades of bleak grey, their mood would drastically sink. Anxiety, panic, depression, all sorts of negative emotions occurred. Just like when drug addicts came down from their high or were cut off. For some, the intensity was stronger than others or their mental was weaker, so the effects and withdrawal symptoms varied in the scientific articles he discovered.
Some of these mono, who were rare and not well understood yet, became obsessed with their probes, unwilling to return to the monotone life. There were some news reports about people who’d turned violent, committing crimes. Those were the popular posts, dominating the first few pages of google when he searched the term. The titles he found were alarming. Abduction, tying up, suffocation, abuse, murder, family suicide, even cannibalism.
After seeing the news, he felt like his slightly broken brain instead contained something like a slumbering, twisted monster. He hoped that he would never meet his probe. He didn’t want that evil inside awakened. He didn’t wish to become chemically unstable. He didn’t want feelings of addiction or withdrawals in his life which would turn his capped emotions haywire. It would put him at risk in several ways. It could potentially ruin the stable lifestyle he’d carefully built.
Despite the government attempted to protect the mono community from being misunderstood, making efforts to show they were humans with disabilities rather than some dangerous monsters, the damage from those hyped situations had been done. People historically had a hard time adjusting to something different, especially if they’d never seen one with their own eyes. They had a tendency to believe the worst in those cases, especially if people around them didn’t express a different view.
The prejudice and fear grew with each negative article. The nation went into a state of hysteria in the ninety’s when journalists brought out several old cases, clumping them together while explaining what a mono was. More people knew about the existence of mono and their reputation became twisted by misinterpretation, mistranslation, and rumors. They were not seen kindly in their first major introduction to the world.
People would move or demand them outed if they learned they were neighbors. Although they were allowed to be educated and work like anyone else since it was not a strong impairment, they weren’t widely accepted in society. There were incidents of bullying, subtle discrimination, and outcasting, almost as if they had become another race – an extremely dirty, wild, unwelcome bunch of barbarians.
Due to the difficulties of two decades living in such an unchanging manner, some started to live outside the city in their own colonies, hidden and protected by the government. Seongwoo didn’t think that was a good idea. It was a temporary fix that actually alienated them further, gave people a clear way to separate, and caused further misunderstanding that they were dangerous (otherwise, why would the government remove them from the city?)
Instead of seeking out the mono communities for safety and companionship, he continued doing what he thought was the right thing to do – blending in with normal people inside the city, hiding the fact he was different. He figured his impairment wouldn’t become a problem as long as he wasn’t close to anyone. He was confident that he could get through his entire life without anyone at work finding out. He was already a master of that, after all. Not a soul outside some of the adults present at the day he was tested knew that he was color-blind. He’d made sure of it.
He was planning to continue hiding as an independent adult, which was why he’d chosen a job that dealt with spread sheets and numbers. At his workplace, even in certain situations when he needed to pick up certain objects, his ten-part grey scale was sufficient. In the case of clothes, he hired a personal stylist to shop and put together outfits for him once a month. That way he wouldn’t get looked at strangely for not matching. Though they were mostly neutral, monochrome colors because it suited his personality well and they wouldn’t go out of style, according to that person.
When it came to food, he usually cooked for himself at home just in case he made a crucial mistake that would make people think he was strange while eating at a restaurant, such as pouring soy sauce on a burger instead of hot sauce. He knew the shapes of ingredients and his nose could pick out how ripe they were. Sauces and spices weren’t an issue since they were labeled. He also kept the side-dishes to the minimum, keeping the ones that were difficult to distinguish by sight alone in labeled containers.
Since he needed at least thirty minutes of daily exercise and the weather was decent (sunny but not extremely hot), Seongwoo went out for a walk. He enjoyed walking outside, but if the weather was nice, he read books inside small, quiet cafes.
He wandered aimlessly down the street full of small shops that had opened late. He kept his hands in his slack pockets, browsing while the wind whipped his bangs into his face. There were sounds of some passing cars and chatting people but not more than he could deal with. He veered off the pavement when he came to a trail. It led to a park that had a stream running through it. Though it was man-made for the people who lived in tall, cement blocks to look down on and get some healing, it looked the same as natural ones, at least to him. His eyes couldn’t see details enough to pick out artificial materials.
Seongwoo, one of the terrifying mono, for the most part lived a normal life in the city. He worked long hours five to six days a week, making a decent monthly salary, partaking in some leisure activities with the cushion after paying bills, only when he had the time and energy. He saw everything that everyone else saw when he ventured out. People walking their dogs in comfortable clothes. Fluffy, swaying trees which if you were lucky occasionally dropped oval or hand shaped leaves. Glistening water rushing over smooth pebbles and small, blooming flowers. Birds pecking at the grass and chirping happily with their mates, then flying off when they got scared by approaching steps.
It was just that he saw that same world in then shades of black, grey, and white. If you were to jump into his head, you would feel as if you were transported into an old photo, except the way people looked and the cars would seem strange, since they would be completely modern. Obviously, it was calmer, easier on the senses, but it was also dull. Everything was so bland that it hardly kept his interest.
The grass and the trees were the same shade of grey and dark greys. The water didn’t look any different than what he saw in his house, sometimes the light grey shades blended so well that he could hardly see ripples or waves which normal people supposedly found enchanting enough to stare at for hours. He’d heard that the color green made you feel at peace and that looking at water for too long made you feel sad. For him, he felt nothing particular when he looked at those, even when they were surrounding him so he had nothing else to look at. They were just as most other things were in his life, moving blobs, squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, ovals, and swirls, layers of grey upon grey.
He was meandering along the narrow, winding path next to the flowing stream, kicking a tiny, round stone in the dirt. His expression might have seemed lost in thought but in reality, his mind was blank. He tried not to think much because it tormented him. Thinking when he didn’t need to stirred up those locked-down emotions. There was no point of thinking of things he had no control over nor could predict.
He was simply alive because that’s what God intended, living for the here and now, not looking forward to something but also not regretting or disliking his life until then. Not enjoying life yet not hating it either, just simply existing in the middle, going about his day one minute at a time – that was his daily emotion as well as his philosophy. Not everyone lived like that but there were some adults who did, so he wasn’t doing something wrong.
When will I be able to see colors, if ever? Will I change or feel differently when if I could see them? Will I die before I experience that? Will I see colors when I go to heaven? Maybe I could if I come across my probe in the afterlife.
There’s better chances to meet them there I suppose than on Earth. At least the number of places will be narrowed and I will have unlimited time to search. Considering there’s seven billion, six-hundred and seventy-four million people on earth, roughly 140 million babies born a year, and the average life span of Korean men is eighty-two years….
The chance to come across the probe in the remainder of his lifetime might as well have been a speck of black dust in a coastline of white sand. Too tiny to calculate with only his brain for a calculator at the moment. Even slimmer when you consider the probability of timing and place. It’s a wonder there’s even been a dozen that have met and been able to interact at all in the last twenty years, when you think of it. You’re more likely to find a diamond on the ocean floor or a needle in a field of cut wheat.
Coming across your probe is nothing short of a miracle.
He noticed a small crowd gathering around a street painter at the edge of an arched stone bridge that went over the stream from park-side to apartment-side. Although he usually had no interest in art because it wasn’t anything that he could begin to understand, he felt oddly drawn to what the street painter was doing. His technique was unique.
On the large, white easel was a faint yet quite detailed sketch that resembled the streamlined with trees beyond the bridge. He was dabbing the river with tiny blobs of paint, alternating swiftly between three different paint brushes he held in one large hand.
He’s layering different colors, but I can hardly tell them apart. Doesn’t it hurt, holding several brushes in one hand? Wouldn’t he get a cramp? How long can he stay like that? Wouldn’t it take forever to fill in the sketch if he does tiny circles on top of circles like that? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to swipe lines along the white parts with one color at least first?
Seongwoo stared, mesmerized. He didn’t understand what he was so intrigued by this person’s painting style exactly, but he couldn’t pull himself away. Time, people, and animals passed by them like the steps of a turtle and Seongwoo was still there, staring at the painter dabbing at his easel. The crowd had shrunk as they lost interest. Yet, he was still fascinated by the painfully slowly changing scenery on the easel.
Was this painting so well-made that even monos could feel touched by it? Did the quality of a painting depend on how much time and effort you put into it?
Or maybe it was the street painter himself which made him stay. There was something different about him besides his unique yet inefficient technique though Seongwoo couldn’t put his finger on it. It was extremely rare for any person on the planet to capture Seongwoo’s attention for more than five seconds. There’d not ever been a time where he observed and thought about another person in detail either.
Judging by his smooth complexion and trendy street fashion, he seemed to be a young man. His body was built more like a construction worker than an artist, but his hands were pretty and delicate, suggesting he’d never done any sort of physical labor. That was an intriguing contrast. The color of the skin covering his long, slender arms was even whiter than his own, suggesting he made efforts not to become tan. His shortly trimmed hair was darker than the fluffy, wavy tendrils on top, but they were both shades of light grey, suggesting that his hair was dyed because Korean’s natural hair color was black.
Wait. It IS a man, isn’t it? Not a girl with short hair? He reminds me of Snow White. Even his ears and the shape of his head seem really delicate and cute. Even from the back, I can tell he must be what people call a ‘flower boy’, meaning he’s as beautiful as flowers. I don’t know if I would say flowers are beautiful, but I sense somehow that this person would be, even to an opinionless, color blind person like myself. I think this is the first time in my life that I felt an ‘aura’ exuding from someone.
Well, his shoulders and hands were certainly bigger than average men, so he couldn’t be a woman. His legs were incredibly long, suggesting he was quite tall, as tall as models were. There were times when a shadow was cast on his arms. Then, thick veins became visible. That was a tell-tale sign. No matter how slender or pretty, a man was still definitely a man based on certain anatomy details.
Seongwoo last track of how many minutes he remained at the bridge, standing still and silent behind the painter like some sort of freak. There were eventually only the two of them in the same spot and he could tell from the length of the shadows that the sun was less than an hour away from fully setting. He’d ended up using his entire weekend afternoon at this park, staring at the backside of a mysterious man and his painting.
The sketch was now three-quarters filled in. The painter had worked on the river first, then he’d moved to the trees and grass, using two different paint brushes to swipe, dab, or swirl the darker and lighter shades in tons of layers moving a hair’s width around each time until they made a thick, interesting blend. As the sun started to go down, it seemed he had sped up his fingers and add another brush, though he did not once change that layered dabbing technique. Even though it was a still-life, 2D art piece, the leaves, grass, and water seemed to be not just moving due to a warm breeze, it rather seemed as if they were dancing to a slow, romance song outside of the paper. It reminded him of a scene from indie films.
How was it that something that didn’t have color seemed so emotional and beautiful? How did it seem to be alive? Was he in a strange mood? Was he dreaming? Could someone be that talented or did he have some sort of superpower?
Seongwoo wasn’t a sentimental sort in the least, to reiterate. He was a rational person that accepted the cold reality, weather it was failure, loss, death, loneliness, just as they were. It was rare that he felt sad or angry looking back on troubles that he’d had. Even if he released the lid, those emotions wouldn’t come out unless they were intensely stimulated.
He hadn’t really wished he had a family just as he’d rarely desired to know the rest of the colors of the world. Even when he’d first heard there was a way that he could see colors temporarily, he was only mildly curious about the process but didn’t have any desire to take risks seeking it out. By the time he was fully adult, he was comfortable with his norm, unwilling to change, pretty much had a solidified character of an emotionless robot – even if it meant that he lacked in emotional experiences, even if he had no deep bonds with anyone so no social life, even if he was always alone outside of work.
He’d honestly thought that lack of desire would never change after he’d lived a quarter of a century. There was a much of a chance for him to change as there was to meet his probe in the same country, same day and place out of the billions of people, trillions of places on Earth - the equivalent of a speck of sand in an ocean. They probably wouldn’t be in this country plus they might not even be living. Considering the amount of accidents and wars that occurred in the world. It would be a once in a gazillion years miracle.
If only I had met my probe, then I would be able to see that painting. I want to see this painting in its intended form, in full. I wish I knew how the blended light and dark colors of those swirling leaves looked like. I wish I knew what color he’d painted the sky, so I have an idea of what the weather is. Is it sunny? Is it cloudy? Is it day or is it dusk? I think I could understand what mood he wants to give off if I knew that.
I can’t tell if this is supposed to make me feel more comforted or more peaceful or more lonely. I’m feeling something, but I don’t understand it. Why do I suddenly need to know what this unidentifiable emotion is? Should I ask him something that I’m wondering about? No, I can’t. That would be rude. He’s still working. I’ve heard artists don’t like to be disturbed and they tend not to tell you their intention because that makes you look at it with a bias.
How does he do this from scratch? He doesn’t pause as if he’s confident he won’t make a mistake and has the entire work laid out like a blueprint in his mind. Or is he the sort of freestyle artist which just goes where the wind blows him? Is he fearless to make mistakes because he had no initial plan to begin with? Which is it? Is he a mastermind or breezy? He seems young, but maybe he’s confident because he has some twenty years of experience and tons of contests on his belt.
What is this painting supposed to make the viewers feel? What is green really like? Is it actually calming? What is blue really like? Is it beautiful but sorrowful? Are there other colors there I can’t detect? What would I feel if I saw the colors and didn’t force my emotions down? Would I have an idea of the story he wants to tell? Is it a story that I could relate to, though I don’t have many experiences in life.
Something started happening to the paper he was intensely staring at while having these dangerous thoughts he couldn’t recall the last time he’d ever had. At first it was a slight change in the corner where the river flowed off the scene, then it spread up to the middle where a bunch of trees bathed in the sunshine. There were faded, waves of mixed colors that he couldn’t identify. He held his breath, following them with his pupils shaking, completely enchanted and not believing what was happening.
Was it a dream? Was it a hallucination? What was he seeing? Was it possibly real? He was suddenly seeing color outside of his dreams? Real colors the way normal people saw them? How did that happen all of a sudden?
Although he couldn’t understand what on Earth was going on, there was zero time to ponder. He was intrigued, amazed, and excited more than he’d ever felt before. His senses and emotions were shocked to life like a jump-started classic car. He greedily sucked up every second, drinking the colors in like a person would gulp water in an oasis, uneasy that it would be taken away from him. He didn’t even wrestle with the flurry of emotions attacking him from the freed pit.
“Ah…”
He winced and grabbed his head. As the spreading, rocking colors became more intense, his eyes stung and his head ached. It felt as if his skull was full of swishing, pushing water, about to burst. He had no choice but to block out the bright stimulation by closing his stinging, teary eyes. It hurt too much to bear, plus he’d become scared.
A change in his world was not something he wanted, as wonderous as it had been for a moment. Like a baby bird who wished to learn how to fly, he was terrified at being pushed from the nest before he was ready. His initial reaction when faced with the chance to jump head-first into the world of color once he realized that it was truly happening was discomfort, anxiety and uncertainty. So, he wanted to reject it by instinct.
The start of all bad things for mono was when they started to see color, he recalled as he attempted to shove his flailing emotions back in his comforting safety net and swipe out the memory of the unnamed colors to the black sheet which decorated the back of his eye-ids.
Once he closed his eyes, he felt dizzy, nauseous, and light-headed. The world started to turn. Actually, it was his unstable body. He was tripping on his feet, then falling backwards as he rapidly faded out of consciousness. He thought it was a side-effect of his brain being stimulated for the first time, being over-worked and unable to function properly.
It never crossed his mind that an impossible miracle might have occurred, that speck of sand in an ocean chance he simply stumbled across. The last thing he recalled before drifting off was the feel of a strong arm securely placed on his back, attempting to prevent him from crashing to the stone surface. Whoever that was, he was grateful. He owed that person his uncracked skull.