Written by Michelle Arnetta
Designed by Kiara Andressa
Once upon a time, I wished to live happily ever after.
I gazed at the mirror, a pair of my own sunken eyes staring back at me. I'd like to think they were a shade as soft as the evening fog, as delicate as a raindrop on a petal. That was but wishful thinking. Everyone I've met has told me that it's the color of the dirt beneath my feet.Unfortunately, even the color of my eyes weren't mine to decide or define, or rather to see at all. After all, I'd always seen the world in black and white...literally.
The ever ticking clock in my room only served to remind me of my impending doom, the calendar square that I feared the most: my eighteenth birthday. That was the time limit set tofind a soulmate, somebody you are bound to by a red thread, somebody who can make yourworld explode with colors the second you meet them. Personally, I found it scary how a measly red thread could dictate somebody's fate, but everybody told me that it was nothing to worry about, that I would find someone eventually. On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, their words don't seem too convincing anymore.
I found no comfort in the whispers I'd overheard, either. Those who have no soulmates, they said, are cursed. That their soulmates met their early deaths, and that they will join in turn. But what else could I do except shudder at the thought?
And that's how I ended up lying on the grass, staring at the stars, casually dealing with an internal crisis.
I longed to see every hue of the sky as much as I longed to join it, to escape from planet earth and its insane fascination with the whole concept of soulmates. And to see the grass asvividly as I felt it tickle my body was a distant dream, yet one I'd always wanted to reach. But as the sun dominated what was of the stars' domain, but as I turned eighteen, nothing changed at all. I was still trapped in this everlasting world of black and white. So why do I feel so liberated? Why do I feel so free?
Because once upon a time, I wished to live happily ever after, and as naive it is, I still do. But Irealised that what once was a seemingly colorful future I envisioned with somebody I never knew, was now what I never truly wanted at all. I "wanted" color, just to prove to everyone that my life was fulfilled. I "wanted" a soulmate, but only to live happily ever after.
Little did I know that a future just as bright could come without colors. The scent of the soil after rain. The feeling of the wind against my skin. The nostalgic melody inside me that I'd memorized by heart.
And so a bright future left me with an inevitable choice: to face the reality before me.