LIFE
THROUGH
THE COLOUR
#57636F

     Every child on their first birthday are given a set of choices. Their choice determines what fate they will have, and what success they will fall into in the future. Laid out on the table, they would put various objects, these were as follows . . . A novel: a scholar. Pen: a writer. Seal: high official. Calculator: a businessperson. Money: an affluent person. Cassette: a musician. Ruler: a lawyer. Straw: an agriculturalist, and so on and so forth.

     During Jeong Hwa-Yeon's Doljabi celebration, her parents and relatives hoped for either a calculator, seal, money or whatever they could predict. Upon the lace cloth that covered their dining table, they had those exact things, and whilst her brother chose the cassette tape, Hwa-Yeon chose . . . a cassette too.

     Okay, that was a normal decision. It was a normal celebration. Everything had been normal. Her choices, as the years progressed, were normal— This continued from cradle days to the age of seven.

     The number seven: symbolism of good omen and a strong path ahead.

     At that age, a hurricane wasn't consistently tangled within her hair. The winds weren't always heightened and thinning the air around her. It wasn't like now. Where broken branches and dried leaves, from skeletal trees, are thrown down her throat by the hurricanes' very hands. It would have then continue to wrap them around her neck and begin compressing . . . compressing . . . and compressing.

     But the number seven passed, and positive omens weakened, the strength of normality in Hwa-Yeon's life was diminished to a nil. The people who made her life iridescent, began to leave. Thus, Jeong Hwa-Yeon started to look at life through the colour #57636F.

     It was neither light nor dark, black or white, grey or blue.

     It was a null shade.

     And it all started with the very second choice that Jeong Hwa-Yeon had to make.

     Everything had blurred in a hasty speed. It was as though Hwa-Yeon was sat at a bustling train station, watching multiple train carriages journey across the rail tracks. People were inside of them, making the right decisions, going to the right places, getting off at the right stops. But Hwa-Yeon was glued to the waiting seats, with no ideas of whether she should be boarding the next train, or if she was at the right station at all.

All that churned inside of her, were emotions of envy, and desire towards those people.

     Choices. People make them all the time.

     But just one thing that Jeong Hwa-Yeon wanted to know, was how people are able to affirm their choices and have fate within the palms of their hands? Or was fate biased? It probably was. She didn't blame fate.

     "Would you like to live with me? Or your grandparents?" Her aunt had asked.

     It was all too much for a nine year old.

     Whimpering with red-rimmed eyes, she scanned the people before her. There were multiple colours, but the two primary colours in her life were gone.

Blue and red.

Her mother and father.

     Now she could see yellow, and secondary colours, green and purple. The expressions engraved upon her family member's faces were coercing. Their stares vacant, but their mannerisms clearly bellowed for her to make them the result of her choice. With a misty vision, Hwa-Yeon gave another look at her aunt, who was forbearing and understanding. For a moment, she thought she saw the colour blue, a soft and amiable shade, like her mother . . . it prompted Hwa-Yeon.

     So she made her answer; Jeong Hwa-Yeon chose to live with her aunt.

But her brother made a contradicting choice. He chose their grandparents. It was the first time where his choice was different from hers.

     Was that were she went wrong? . . . Was that where Hwa-Yeon went wrong?

Jeong Hwa-Yeon found herself imagining that compacted train station again, but this time she was on the tracks. So that was where she was meant to be. In the eye-line of unexpected; jeopardy. People still filed into the beige coloured carriages, their faces morphed together, everything was a messy palette, she tried to move, but her feet wouldn't shift.

Nobody helped.

Instead of climbing out of the tracks herself, Hwa-Yeon's legs began to sprint towards the opposite direction. She didn't know where the tracks would lead her to, because she wasn't on the train, there were no stops awaiting for her. From the day she chose to stay with her aunt instead of her grandparents, that was when she grew wearied. The skin around her ankles were bitten down from running. They were raw and sensitive, and the pain meandered towards her core.

Even though Hwa-Yeon saw life through the colour #57636F, she still accepted the few opal greens and punch pink that her life threw at her. But every time she did, remorse gnawed at her flesh, its gruesome teeth left permanent wounds all over her arms and legs. It created a far more damage on her feet, than her running on the harrowing train-tracks.

Even so, she kept going. Until another colour was torn from her life.

Yellow.

Yellow was gone.

Her brother was gone.

Jeong Hwa-Yeon was left with a mixture of colours that created the shade #57636F— it was dull, though it tried to be opalescent sometimes. It was the only colour that surrounded her, as she weeped over the loss of yellow.

The second most heart-rending occurrence to her life, had happened only three years before the age of eighteen. Another experience, that was too much weight for a teenager. Hwa-Yeon recalled the black silky uniform that clung to her skin, but she was not unfamiliar with it and it returned the feeling towards her too.

     Was it because of her second choice, that another of her dear ones had succumbed to the inevitable?

The imagery of the railway greeted her once more. Was this the last? Jeong Hwa-Yeon didn't know, but one things for certain was that she was tired, admittedly. There were no traces of healthy flesh around her legs. The train-tracks had pushed Hwa-Yeon to her limits, if not more, and if she kept going, any traces of her ivory bones would be zero to none— Jeong Hwa-Yeon had to stop.

     So she did.

     But why did the colour #57636F enhance in intensity? Why did the colours around her darken, when she finally felt confident with a choice that she made? She was caught in a haze as she stopped running on the tracks, and got off a platform for the first time after years. But whereabouts was she? What platform was she on?

     Hwa-Yeon didn't know.

     That was when her third choice arrived.

     At her brother's consignment to the grave, she couldn't bear to stay any longer. The fifteen year old fled the scene, letting her old and beaten down Converses lead the way. This time, she wasn't imagining herself on the train tracks, but she was face-to-face with her reality.

     Left or right? Left or right?

     She chose left, and arrived at a store. It had a welcoming sign, so she invited herself in. Was it a terrible choice? Mirrors surrounded her within the dimly lit store. Hwa-Yeon found herself cowering away, but from wall to wall, there was a reflection of her, she couldn't move again. But, this time it wasn't her imagination, it was her reality.

     She took a good look at herself at one point.

     A feeble and puny version of her locked eyes with her. Was that the face of an affluent person? No, Hwa-Yeon didn't pick the batch of money on her first birthday. She wasn't a writer either. Nor was she a high official, a businessperson, a lawyer, or an agriculturalist.

     All she could see was someone that made all the wrong choices.

Ditto, True Beauty
SEASON ONE — EPISODES 1-TBD

WITH LOVE, SYLVIA
© fIowerfieId 2022