Colours

It started with good and bad. As children we're taught lessons at mom and dad's knees to watch out for strangers and bad people. Illustrations in our story books always showed the evil characters as ugly, wart-ridden, malformed subhumans. We learned to delineate the people we could trust or like by their appearances and first impressions, making opinions based on black and white. As we grew a little older it became evident that judgements drawn from how beautiful a person was on the outside couldn't be used as the litmus test for determining friendship or worthiness. False niceties were learned, used and identified depending on our moods, attitudes and expectations of others. Friends became a thing to toss around, exchange and refund at the lunch table on a regular basis. We bartered for what we wanted, left behind the refuse and in the end came out of some difficult growing years bearing battle scars won by crossing that line in the sand with our allies. Our worlds became shades of grey and we knew that even things set in stone would eventually erode away from the daily bashing from the elements we call life.

Each passing moment teaches us something new about the way the world works, so splendidly laid out if only we would open our eyes. When we wipe away the blur of ignorance to get a glimpse of the truth it hurts and we're shocked and we can't believe that nobody ever told us before how foggy it can be. The truth is that there is no such thing as black and white or shades of grey because then it would the simplification of an equation that can't be solved. To assign a colour to life would spell the end of discovery and questioning, and making things defined as we see fit would only serve to close our eyes again to the world outside of our minds when we should be pushing the boundaries and sharing ourselves with each other.

I can't tell who is a good person and who isn't anymore, I used to think that it was so easy and relied on snap judgements to instantly like or dislike someone. 'Good' is so subjectively used and loosely defined that it doesn't even really mean anything anyway. The more people I meet the more I see how little I know of the human composition and how complex relationships can be, no matter how casual or deep they are. I have some very good friends now who started off as bugs on my windshield, most probably for some slight I can't even remember. Then there are others with whom an instant connection was made and we thought we'd be friends forever. Disagreements were the melodramatic annoyances of others we couldn't understand and our differences only made us link up together to form a stronger bond. After awhile there were bound to be chinks in the armour and cracks in the mortar. After awhile it became apparent that we weren't really that alike to begin with, or maybe we were so alike that we see reflections of ourselves in each other that we didn't really want to see, and the differences we had embraced were starting to smother the relationship until one of us let go and we fluttered away until there was nothing left.

People I had thought were solid and trustworthy turned out to have as many faces as there are cards in their wallets. People you thought you knew enough suddenly became a complete stranger you can't reach or connect with and it makes you wonder if you could be one of these people. I open my mouth to see if the tongue inside is forked and turn my head to see if there's another face back there. I can see how devious and flawed you are but I can't see my horns no matter how many mirrors there are and how unbiased I try to be because the truth is I see me the way you see you.