Take Off Your Colours

As her senses sharpened, returning back from the brink of numb, dull lack of feeling, the very first thing that she noticed was the colour.
All sense of reality seemed to have been lost to the world. The colours – it was as if they were saturated, their brightness increased tenfold. Individual details had become impossible to pick out amongst the haze of whirling colour. And the shade couldn’t stay the same – tiny changes, yet still noticeable. Shifting a fraction of a millimetre up the colour chart each second until its true colour was lost on her.
The longer she looked, the more she began to realize other things. This whole scene – there was something so unrealistic about it. As if a photograph had been given to a young child, and he or she had been allowed to paint over it as he or she pleased. As if they had tried to recreate it on top, and done a very poor job of it. Everything seemed so two-dimensional, to the point that it seemed barely believable that there was even something there.
It was as she was thinking this that the first of many things happened.
Her hand seemed to knock into something, sending spasms of pain running up her arm. But it just didn’t stop at her arm – it spread like wildfire through her whole body, forcing her to squeeze her eyes shut and force herself not to cry out.
The pain took a long time to pass, but when it did, there was no gradual fading out. One minute it was there, the next it may as well never have been there at all.
Slowly, tentatively, she opened her eyes once more.
The scene had changed completely. It was as if water had been dropped on the painting – the colours were running into each other, interweaving and blending until it was all one big mash and there was no way of knowing what she was seeing at all. And somehow, the scene from a few minutes – or was it a few moments? – ago refused to play in her head.
She didn’t know where she was, what she was doing.
Come to think of it, she didn’t know a lot of things. Things she had never before questioned began to run through her head. Little, everyday things were suddenly oh-so-fascinating to her. Why do some people care so much about others, and then other people not care at all? Why do we thrive off of love? What is the definition of beauty, or the definition of intelligence? Suddenly it all seemed to matter so much to her.

And whilst her mind was racing, her ears suddenly seemed to re-awaken, and her hearing sense returned. The second thing that she noticed was the screaming.
Screams. Before she hadn’t been even the slightest bit aware of them, but now that she was she couldn’t seem to push them out of her head. They filled her ears, her very body, making her shake and vibrate uncontrollably. Her hand flailed for something to grab onto, something to steady her grip, and yet it groped only at thin air. The screams ran through her.
And yet, they were just…screams. There was no expression in them, no noticeable feeling that she could pick out. Were they shouting for joy, elated over some happy event? Or were they screams of fear, terror? Terror of what? Were they, perhaps, screams of sorrow, racked sobs causing their bodies to shake?
The answer came so easily, and yet at the same time so hard to acknowledge – she honestly didn’t know.
There were colours, and there were screams. It was all she knew.

But as this strange scene began to play out, something became visible, noticeable, in her line of sight. Something she could name, identify. The third thing that she noticed was the blood.
It was unmistakeable. Torrents of it, and it was everywhere. Seeping underneath her feet – her foot suddenly felt very cold, and it seemed to have gotten an electric shock. Coating the walls and the floor. Not that there was a distinct line between wall and floor anymore. But it was everywhere. It was drowning out everything else, that unmistakeable shade of red.
Was it coming from her? That was the immediate thought that crossed her twisted, tainted mind. Was she dying? Was that why she was feeling so many emotions, sensing so many things?
No. No, she couldn’t be. Whatever this was, it was far from being a description of death. She had never in her whole life felt more alive than she did now. There was nothing beautiful about this feeling – in fact, it was as if a thousand knives had been plunged into her body and were hacking away at her from the inside out – but it was so, so alive.
Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t dying. That was out of the question.
Unfortunately, ruling that question out left so many more unanswered. If the blood wasn’t hers, who was it? The screams couldn’t be disembodied voices – though by now there was no way she could see them, there had to be other people in this room.
So which one of them was bleeding?
Were they feeling what she was feeling right now?
And one question had been lingering at the back of her mind, inching slowly forwards and each time getting forcibly pushed back, refusal and denial forcing it away long before it became a conscious thought. But now it came to her, and even though the thought caused her to wince, to shake even more, she couldn’t take it back, and there was a part of her that knew that there was no way to truthfully answer it in the negative.
Was this what madness looked like?

The minute the thought occurred to her, she felt herself seize up. There was nothing she could do as she crashed to the floor. It felt like liquid beneath her as she slipped slowly away. The melting, colourful, bloody world was gone from her vision without a single thought to it. Surrounded by blackness and the feeling of alive completely gone, an echo ran through her ears even after she was lost to the world---
“Hold on, Bethany. Hold on.”