Colours

I found myself in yet another unfamiliar room, this time a house. It was small, well furnished, and exactly to my liking. There was a pool in the backyard, and the kitchen-dining room's window gave me a perfect view of it. The lawn was perfectly manicured, and completely healthy. There were flowers in the front yard, and a fence bordering my small property. The house was two stories. It was the perfect home for all those children stories, except for the fact that it had no colour.

I had neighbours on either side of me, and there were houses across the street that seemed to go on forever. I stepped out of my home, and knocked on the door of my neighbour to the left's home. It was a large Victorian, and trees lined the huge property. A young girl who looked about seventeen answered, followed by a small two year old boy and an old man in a wheelchair.

"Can I help you?" The girl asked me. The shape of her eyes told me that she was a nice person. The expression etched into her face told me that she was begging for an excuse to leave the company of her household.

"Yeah, you can help me. I guess you could say that I'm new to this whole dead-but-alive thing, so I was kind of hoping that you could help me out a little. You know, act as my therapist?" She smiled so wide that I thought it might swallow her face.

"Of course! Here, why don't we go...?" She signalled me with her hand to offer some place other than where we were.

"To my house," I said and took her hand. We walked the few steps to my residence, and I brought her along to the backyard. She sat down on one of the plastic fold-up chairs, while I chose to dip my feet in the pool.

"So, well, I guess first things first. My name's Hayley. Now, ask me what you need to know." She crossed one leg over the other and faced me.

"Okay, well, how long have you been here for?" I asked slowly. I swirled the water in the pool with my toe, making whirlpool-type things on the surface.

"I don't know." She said simply. I pulled my feet out of the water.

"You don't know? How can you not know?" She sighed and pointed to the window of my bedroom.

"Haven't you noticed that there's no bed in there? You don't sleep here. It never get's dark. All you do is breath and eat. You don't even have to go to the washroom, or shower even. And so, since it never gets dark, it means that the sun never moves, which means that there's no way to tell the time anyways. This place is like a fucked-up version of earth, except when you think about it, it's a lot easier."

"Can you give me an estimate, at least?" I asked a lot harsher than I meant to. I was having a lot of information poured on to me, but none of the information was answering my simple little question.

"Long enough," she answered me coolly, and I let it go. There were things I cared about more.

"Santa Claus told me that I'm supposed to 'find colours', however that works. Is this like a giant game of hide and go seek? Are they hiding behind the trees?"

"He used the wrong word... He's known to do that, actually. He told me to capture them, and so I started chasing butterflies and shit around when I first got here. But... I can't tell you how to start seeing in colours." I frowned.

"Why not? Nobody has to know that you told me... I mean, I know, to see in colour is the goal here, and having you tell me is kind of like cheating... But I mean, one person out of however many are here isn't gonna kill anyone." She laughed a bit at my video-game analogy, and then shook her head.

"No, as in, I literally can't tell you. I can't tell you. And even if I could, I would never be able to explain it to you properly."

"All right...Well then, how many colours can you see? Are you allowed to tell me that?"

"I can see yellow, blue, red and gray. And maroon, but that's an ugly colour anyways, so I don't really care about it." I tried to remember what these colours looked like, but I couldn't. All I could see were these eyes, and extremely bright hair, which I assumed to be associated with these colours. I felt my face furrow in concentration, trying to remember these colours. I knew that if I could remember the colours of those two things, that my life - or afterlife, whatever it really was - would be much, much, much more manageable. But I couldn't remember, so I stopped thinking about colours altogether. I decided to move on to another topic, one not so frustrating, and so I asked the first thing that came to my head.