The Softest Gray in a Colorless City

I have learned to live without color. The city is a long corridor of charcoal and ash, the sky a sheet of washed-out silver, and even my own skin feels like an exposure left too long in the dark. I sit on the couch at the edge of dusk, one hand flat against the fabric, the other resting where my breath slows. There is no red here, no gold, no lie dressed up as warmth.
Then he comes home and does not bring color either. He brings only his shadow, long and deliberate, pooling across my knees like a second skin. He traces the lace at my thigh with a fingertip that knows every contour of me by memory alone. In his touch I feel the old wound—the one that bled bright red months ago—finally dry into a quiet, healed gray.
I lean into the dark he casts around me and understand that warmth was never a hue. It is the weight of a hand, the slow curve of breath, the silhouette of someone who stays. In this monochrome world we are not two colors clashing; we are one soft shadow learning, at last, to hold itself.

Editor: Monochrome Ghost