White on White | Teen Ink

White on White

July 7, 2012
By starbucksandbrighteyes GOLD, Rockville, Maryland
starbucksandbrighteyes GOLD, Rockville, Maryland
15 articles 6 photos 4 comments

Favorite Quote:
Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.<br /> ~Marsha Norman


They lead me into a large, white room, speckles of dust glimmering on the barren walls.

It’s a dark white, not the nice, snowy kind that I’ve grown to know and love. No, this is that vacant, ominous white, the color of a blank page and a lonely life to come, the kind they’d use to detain someone who believes that there are different shades of white. Someone like me.

Because white’s calm. White’s sane. They’d like to see someone make crazy out of white, and dear God I will try.

I hear a woman screaming a biblical name. It’s mine, I recall, as I slip into first, a little late, just like always. I should turn my feet out—point my toes—or do I even dance ballet anymore?

The doors close and the key clicks into the lock. Now there’s no turning back, and I almost laugh.

As if there ever was.

And then I come to the realization that this is it. This is my life, and all it’s ever going to be, just me and this large, plain room, gazing up above, trying to characterize the shade of white on the walls.

From a distance, I hear rushing water.

It reminds me of my father.

And that’s how I knew I wasn’t crazy.


The author's comments:
One night at eleven o’clock or so when my parents were both away, I was abed with whirling thoughts and a still very much awake mind. I heard water churning through the pipes from a distance, and I immediately thought of my dad, who would come upstairs late at night, wash up, and cause the sound of running water to echo throughout our home. ‘But he wasn’t even home’ I thought, which raised the question: did I even really hear the water, or was it just a figment of my imagination? With that, I came up with the ending of this piece, flicked on a lamp, picked up a pencil and an old picture, and wrote the whole piece then and there.

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