The Colour of Nothing
They say life is grey
a quiet meeting of shadow and light,
a thousand shades of almost,
where nothing is wholly lost
and nothing entirely bright.
But mine- was never grey.
Mine was pitch black.
Not the kind of darkness
that comes with night
and leaves with morning,
but the kind that settles beneath the skin,
where even the light forgets your name.
There was nothing to see there—
no horizon,
no doorway,
no distant star
to promise that somewhere,
something waited.
Only emptiness.
A vast, unending room of darkness
inside a heart
that had forgotten
what it was waiting for.
So I tried to wash it away
with tears.
I wept until my eyes were rivers,
until sorrow had nothing left to give,
until every drop I carried
had fallen at my feet.
But darkness does not drown.
It only learns
how to breathe underwater.
Then I tried colour.
I gathered every shade I could find—
the red of old desires,
the blue of distant skies,
the yellow of borrowed laughter,
the green of things still growing.
I painted my walls
with all the colours of living.
But when I stepped back
to admire what I had made,
The darkness remained.
It swallowed every colour
without leaving a stain.
Perhaps that is what no one tells you—
that sometimes the soul
is not a canvas waiting for colour,
nor a wound waiting for tears.
Sometimes it is simply
a sky without stars,
A sea without a shore,
A page so deeply black
that even the brightest ink
looks like another shade of silence.
And yet—
Somewhere beneath all that darkness,
beneath the tears that could not cleanse it,
beneath the colours that could not reach it,
Something still remained.
Not hope.
Not yet.
Just a small, stubborn pulse—
Quietly insisting
that emptiness itself
is not the end of the story.
Copyright © Sandra Elza | Year Posted 2026
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