Soledad.

The ceiling was sad and white. Bone-white with those scrapes, upturned flakes and coal-black holes. It was sad and white.

Her black eyes, black as the holes, frowned at the ceiling. Frowned at space. She was sad, like the wall. The sad wide wall held up above her. It reminded her of space. The space that hugged everything lovingly into its arms.

She felt like she was space. Her chest was vast as space, empty and still, speckled with bits of feelings here and there. All she thought of now was black and white. It was her art that was black and white. Now it’s braided into her brain; gray-matter made out of blank and dark.

Drawing the stillness, the calm, the dead-silence that’s embedded within her, within the most delicate crack of bone-tissue, within her aching wrists, was the whole point of her clutching to her pencils, markers and paper.

Her name, the one she chose for herself, wasn't wasted on her lack of interest or emotions: Soledad.

Solitude. Just like space is lonely in its bigness and endlessness. Her chest was so vast and big that it echoed silence.

And she can hear that silence; she just didn't bother to listen. Soledad just kept looking at the blackness of space, choked in the holes above her; she kept looking at the upturned flakes of paint, falling by the second.

She was empty like space. And she needed to push that emptiness out.
So she let eyes slide along the walls and her arms, and she bent. Away from the ceiling. Then looked down to her notebook. Also white and black. The pages were wide and vast like her. And they were blank. Completely blank waiting for some tender hand to keep them company, even if it meant dirtying their blinding white. They didn't want to be lonely and undrawn anymore.

Soledad stared at the sad pages and began to draw. First she began with lines, squares and rectangles; then, came the coats of black, lighter black, shady gray, then white, scratched up white then newspaper white.

Then her wrists began to bleed ink and affection. Faces, words, retinas and miles of wavy jet-black hair came streaming out of her pen. She was a broken fountain that'll never stop until the spring, the pipe, the sewer dries. Soledad was relieving the ache in her wrists and the space in her core. The Earth had a molten lava core; it created volcanoes when it got mad. Soledad had an expanding vacancy right in the middle of her; it gave birth to storms and revelations.

She began to draw their story. The story that made her empty; sucked the life and empathy out of her. The story of her love with them. She loved them, but she couldn't love each of them on his own, because they couldn't work that way: her, him and him. They needed each other to work.

Three perfectly fitted puzzle pieces that fit together like a miracle. Except that, when you look at the picture the puzzle paints, it's ugly; it's a monster.

At first, she liked both of them alone, but when they met she fell for both of them together. Eventually they fell for each other too, and it devoured her heart up like Red Death in a banquet.

They were black and white. And she was their gray. Black and white fell for each other and left gray all alone, stranded waiting for one of them to bring her home.

They merged her into what she is. An empty girl with nothing but her pens and marks to let out the gusts of lurid space: inner turmoil. So she draws them out.

She drew the lines of the faces; she drew bold mouths; she drew solemn eyes with smoky rings of black using soft-tipped pencils that she smudged gently with her fingertips; she drew the necks, haughty and pristine, then she went on outlining the speech bubbles, dedicating a letter to each one. The one near the bold mouth was called Daniel, the one above the smoky sad eyes was named Michael(Angel), and the last one, under the cutoff neck and the chin covered with eyelashes, was called Moira.

The story, their story, began to draw itself eventually. It didn't matter if she tried to keep it dead; it kept beating and pulsating within her wrists. Ink wriggled out on its own to word out what slept in the back of her skull, along with broken rhymes from when she was a broken little girl.
Three, six, nine. The goose drank wine. The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. The line broke. The monkey got choked. They all went to Heaven in a little row boat. She kept thinking of that poor streetcar line. She considered it a someone. Someones kill, even if they don't mean to.

By now, Soledad didn't want to do this; she tried to stop drawing but her hands wouldn't keep down, and it showed. Zigzags and the fast thin lines rapidly surrounded Daniel's hand, like the whispers of an enchanted crowd, blending into one streak of black that headed for Moira's face. Moira whose eyes were spangled with hurt, but fixated on Michael’s own, to see that they're the same as hers.

The page after had Moira, with her long gray body, all over Michael, her hands thrown around his neck as if trying to contain him inside of her space. Her shirt had stains of white; drizzles of white smearing her arms, drizzles of white that soaked her front and sank into her flesh. His colorless head, composed of thick lines of white encompassed with thin black ones, was buried in her small gray chest. All of that was in the middle of the page with blankets of black hung all over them; left to dry; a cage of black.

Another page had only words; Soledad fingers shook as they poured down to the naked eye's view: one, two, three. never may be.

Three words, then three words.

She kept thinking of threesomes: they never work. That's why she kept thinking of that streetcar line once more. The monkey, the goose, and the streetcar line. She compared them to them. But who was who? She knew who the streetcar line was. It was her. The goose's fun was ruined and the monkey was killed because she broke. The line broke.
And she broke their triangle; but, black and white loved each other nevertheless. Black kept attacking the brilliance out of the white and white kept sucking the dark out of the black. The goose kept drinking its wine and the dead monkey kept chewing those clumps of tobacco. They never saw Heaven.

Groups of three never may be.

She was the aftermath of groups of three. She was empty with nothing on the inside. It was a circle that took its toll and ate her up. She was damaged; they were damaged, too. But not like her.

Soledad is crying her chest out, tears broken and shoulders heaving heaving heaving; all while her fingers keep drawing and dancing on another paper; now her pencil's coating Moira's eyelids and singing her a lullaby until those gray pupils were drowned in a sea of darker gray. Lead gray. Lead gray until the paper broke into two.

Then.

She broke the tip of the pencil. Rolled the little graphite ball, twisted it into powder within her palm. It turned into black and black and melancholic black upon her now reddened swollen lines of skin. And with the remainder of the tip of the pen, she began to smudge Daniel and his eyes, black pitless eyes that suck you in and never let you go; those eyes, black pupils, were nothing like Michael’s. And she meant it that way. She just left Michael’s eyes blank. No exaggerated shades of white. Just blank. Pure and blank.
But that didn't mean that Michael wasn't pure to her. Black didn't mean evil. It's just a color. It can mean anything. Just like red can mean life or roseate can mean girl and blue can mean boy.

This isn't a story anymore, Soledad's pen weeps.

The pen's drinking all the sad, all the liquid, liquefied pus of her heart. And it's splattering it in line-vomit over her pages. The pages are falling, swaying to the floor as she keeps her pace; the pen's keeping its pace and filling up the page. It's draining itself up as Soledad’s heart-abscess is welting inside her.

Finally, the pen stops. It halts and stumbles, digging into the paper as no more ink remained. It refused to bleed for her anymore. All that was left, on the last page, was a line; a gray fading line. Moira from afar; Moira in the horizon all alone with two other lines, one pitch-black and the other invisible molten in the white of the page, together.

Soledad stops as well. Looking at the dead pen; the drained pen that bled its life, ink for her sake.

This isn't a story anymore, the pen's last cries seep on the floorboards, and the vast space in her chest expands and expands,

it's you.

And Soledad keeps dying with her pen, keeps telling her story and keeps shoving her hands into her chest looking for the missing white and the strayed black of her.

Only to realize what she's lost is the gray.