She Writes in Grayscale

When she was in high school, she wrote with colors.

She wrote with the shades of a heart, and the shades of the sky. She wrote with the subtle differences in each color of green on each blade of grass. She wrote with the color of light flowing out of her fingers and the colors of orange in fall tumbling out of her mouth and dancing across the paper like leaves dancing across the sky.

She wrote with the pinks and purples of sunset and every color of dawn. She wrote with the tones of earth that you could scoop up in your hands and let drip through your fingers. She wrote with the pastel colors of twilight and the bright hues of a coral reef on the coast of some foreign country she would never get the chance to see.

She wrote with a prism hanging above her paper so she could see the colors of the world, and she wrote with rainbows seeping out of her pores and collecting themselves on paper to form letters, words, and sentences.

But now,  she writes in monotone.

She writes in black and white and a grayscale so limited you can't tell the difference between a comma and an apostrophe, and letters in words fade together and fade away until all you can see is the white of the paper behind them.

She writes like a still, somber statue, with pen in hand, but to slow and too weathered to move it. Her once bright words are like smoke from a cigar against a white backdrop in a black room, barely visible and barely there for a instant.

Because smoke fades away, and ink will always dry out, and inspiration left her like the way snow leaves a cloud - beautiful, but cold.