Beep, beep, beep, beep… The alarm shouts its angry song. Crap, Monday. I open my eyes. Not again… I take a shower; the water is lukewarm, and I just now remember that I have no conditioner. Crap. Well, it probably wouldn’t have helped this rat’s nest anyway. I get out of the shower. Somehow that sorry-excuse-for-warm water managed to steam up the mirror. I look at my face through the fog. It looks loose and tired, not like the face I remember, not like me. Who am I kidding? That is me. How did I become this? I look at my face a bit closer. My hair is much shorter than it used to be, not because I thought it would look good, but because the thought of maintaining long hair just made me so tired. It’s not pink anymore either; the insurance company I work for said no unnatural colours. So now it’s dead-grass brown. And grey. Oh my god, I have grey hair. My hair is grey; my face is grey; I am grey. My life is grey.

    I go back to my room so I can put on my ugly work clothes so I can go to my ugly job. As I am getting dressed, my wife wakes up. “Morning,” she says. She has a musical voice, despite how early it is.

    “Morning,” I reply. Being an elementary teacher, her life isn’t much more colourful than mine.

    She sits up and stretches. God she’s beautiful in the morning. “Any warm water left?”

    “Enough.”

    She leaves for the shower. I look down at my work clothes. The pants are--guess what--grey and the shirt is an ugly red. Not a fun, fire engine red as I would have liked, but a blood-vomit red. Ugh. I finish getting ready and climb into my sensible, mid sized sedan just as I do every day. I drive smoothly to the highway where I am stopped by morning traffic. 10 minutes pass. 15. Great, now I’m going to be late. I wait among all these other people who are just like me--mindless cattle; lambs to the slaughter. Finally, I arrive at work. Nobody noticed that I was late. Good for me, I guess. I sit down at my desk. It is a flat brown. Someone has already brought in the mortality tables for me. I get to spend another day figuring out how much to charge people based on how likely they are to die. Fun. I never wanted to be an insurance adjuster. I wanted to write books for a living. Words have meaning; numbers do not. But there’s no money in that, my mom said, so I decided to go into insurance. Life insurance, to be exact. Because everybody dies.

    The day trudges on, just as every day does, with me staring at mortality tables, hating it. I skip lunch, hoping the extra hour of work will make the day end sooner. It doesn’t. I am a meaningless cog in the meaningless machine. After work, I walk to my car. My sensible, mid sized sedan is grey. Just grey. Nothing like the yellow Volkswagen beetle I used to have. I loved that car. When it broke, everyone told me to get a “normal” car. The grind has stripped me from myself. I get in my car and begin driving home. I could drive away to some distant, faraway place right now. There’s no one here to stop me. But I don’t. I keep my car on its well-worn path home.

    After a drive that was way too long, I get home. I’m indifferent to this house. I go inside. The warm air feels nice on my skin. As I kick my shoes off, my wife walks up to me and gives me a hug. “Have a nice day?” she asks. I breath her in. She smells like life.

    “I have a grim, grey job.”
    “So it’s perfect for you,” she laughs. A little insulting, but her comment still makes me smile. Her hair is a fiery auburn and her cheeks rosy. Her personality shines yellow, which she uses to light up every room she walks into. Her aura is aquamarine with flecks of gold, bright and shiny like she is. Her jokes are a perky purple; her smile a cheery cherry; and her laugh a blaze orange that everyone notices. She is definitely not grey. And she is all the colour I need.