Blue

It was crying.

I didn’t know why.

A strange creature had appeared in my world. It looked different—different from everything else in this world.

It had color.

I hadn’t seen color in a long time. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw anything other than black or white, but it wasn’t like I didn’t know what other colors were. I’ve seen them before—some place, some time, a long long time ago—and I could still identify them by sight.

This creature in front of me, for example, was painted in a deep shade of blue. It was a blob-like creature—no face, no nothing—but somehow I could tell it was crying.

Curiously, I reached out towards it, but then retracted my hand back.

What was I trying to do anyway? I didn’t know, but some part of me wanted to do something, and somehow, it was my instinct to reach out a hand.

For a few more moments I kept staring at the creature, watching as it continued to cry and slowly turn a darker and darker shade of blue.

Some part of me wanted to see how much darker it could get. Would it eventually turn black like some of the things in my world? But if it did, then this creature wouldn’t be interesting anymore. It would just blend in with everything else in the black and white world I lived in.

Turning towards the creature, I decided to do something else that I hadn’t done in a long time.

I spoke.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

The creature froze and slowly turned its head towards me, and I noticed that they had stopped turning darker. Seeing as talking seemed to stop its un-blueification process, I decided to ask another question.

“Why are you so blue?”

The creature continued staring at me and I began to notice that it had a face. I couldn’t make out its expression, however—to me it only had two black dots for its eyes, and a line for a mouth but neither seemed to show any expression.

Until it opened.

“Is that how you talk to a lady who’s crying?” the creature asked.

A lady? I thought, now that I think about it, it does look like one.

Slowly, the creature began to transform in front of my eyes until it took the shape of a woman.

A lady.

I hadn’t seen one in a long time, nor anything else for that matter. Until now, it had only been me in this monotonous world, but somehow I remembered that I lived in a world before that. ‘How else would I know these things that don’t exist here?’ I would reason.

“I’m sorry,” I said, a phrase that I recalled that would make bad things a little less bad.

The woman gave me a somewhat confused look, the first expression I’ve seen in a while, and I began to wonder if I said something weird. Perhaps that sort of phrase wasn’t appropriate in a situation like this. However, I suddenly noticed the shade of blue on her lightening up.

“No, don’t be,” she said, “I should be the one ashamed of crying on the bus like this.”

I looked around the place.

A bus? I wondered, is that where I am right now?

Until now, I only knew two places that existed in my world; ‘home’ and ‘not home’. Everyday I would leave ‘home’ and go explore ‘not home’, always returning back to ‘home’ to go to sleep. ‘Not home’ was big unlike ‘home’, and I always wondered if there were more places in ‘not home’.

Today I found out that such a place did exist, and was called a ‘bus’. I didn’t know what it was, nor how it differentiated itself from every other blank white location in the world, but if this blue lady said it’s called a bus, then so shall it be.

“What’s a bus?” I asked.

The hue of her color turned brighter once more.

“You don’t know what a bus is?” she asked, “even though you got on one?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know where I’m going most of the time, I just go.”

The girl snorted, and for the first time, I saw a smile on her face. “I wish I could think like that,” she said. “Things might be easier that way.”

A smile. Something I recalled from the world I theoretically used to live in, and something that was apparently associated with good things. Perhaps I knew a lot more facial expressions than thought, despite having never seen one—I think. Nevertheless, I was slightly worried. If she continued turning lighter and lighter, she would eventually become white like everything else in my world. And that was boring.

I wanted to see more colors. I was tired of seeing black and white. I looked back at the girl. If talking to her made her color lighter, then perhaps it was best that I stopped.

Upon my silence she made another confused expression, as if the fact that I stopped conversing with her was weird. Maybe it was the expectation that because I turned to her again, I would have something to say, but because I gave her nothing, she didn’t know what to make of it.

“You’re a weird person” she finally said, “but in a good way I suppose.”

Weird can be good? I thought, trying to reassign how I processed the word.

She then stood up, and it was only then that I noticed that she had been sitting the whole time. In fact, her entire form had become a lot more clear than from the first time I saw her.

“This is my stop,” she continued. “I don’t know where your stop is, but I hope we can meet again.”

What a… ‘weird’ creature, I thought, still processing the new definition that I just acquired. But not in a bad way… I suppose.

As I watched her form walk away, I noticed that she was walking in a straight line.

So even this creature is forced to follow movement rules, I wondered.

Despite this world being nothing but a blank white canvas, I found that some places in ‘not home’ forced me to walk in a specific manner or direction. I called those specific actions ‘movement rules’. This place in particular made me climb up something and walk in a straight line before sitting down. I couldn’t see what I was climbing up nor what I was sitting down on, but the movements came to me as naturally as breathing. Seeing how other creatures that existed in this world had to follow the same set of movement rules made me feel a bit better about having to follow them myself, and made me realize that places with certain movement rules may be an entire location itself rather than just ‘not home’.

Maybe that's what a ‘bus’ is, I thought. A place where you had to follow the movement rules of climbing up something, walking in a straight line, and sitting down.

As soon as I formed that thought however, I began to see black lines sprouting out of thin air in the white canvas around me, moving and connecting to each other to form a room, like a drawing being sketched onto a piece of paper. When they finally stopped appearing, I looked around the place in wonder. Next to me were a pair of seats, and as I stood up, I noticed more and more of them lined up and arranged in neat rows—each of them empty and white and outlined in black, just like my home was.

The rows were split down the middle to form what looked to be an open area to walk through as if visually depicting the movement rule I had to follow before.

It was weird. It was the first time I saw such a thing happen, and as I looked down the outlined pathway that had seemingly formed, I saw the girl continue to walk down until she suddenly made a sharp turn to the right, walking into a black wall that had appeared along with the lines.

And just like that, she disappeared.