Matchless

Before highschool I didn’t really care.

Was I insecure then, in middle school? Not that I can recall.

I stepped into the blindly colorful building and felt astounded, proud, relieved.

Then the colors blended into each other, mixing until they turned a dirty shade of brown

as all unique colors do when unmatching shades mix.

I watched those colors move across the halls, into their classrooms, exit through the doors.

The longer I watched the more I believed they were all different shades of that same damn color.

They didn’t want me there. I didn’t match. I was clashing with them in an unaesthetic ugly way.

I added so many colors to myself hoping it would bring me closer, but I ended up turning brown myself. 

I sat alone after that. 

For many weeks I sat and sat and sat, no friend, no click, a means to an end, a means to a-

I cracked, broke, my insides spilling out of me, revealing the lesson i’d been too naive and ignorant to see until I learned it the hard way.

I was so busy focusing on how I never fit in. I was so scared I didn’t match, until I saw what spilled out of me.

It wasn’t brown.

No one spilled out the same color. 

I was merely one of the thousands of people who mixed their colors to try to match, until they didn’t.

I looked up again and in shock I saw people of colors id never even seen. Colors I don’t think the human eye can see.

I saw people for the colors on the inside. The colors they bled.

It took me until now to see that no one can ever fit in, that no one ever did.

We are all in one big game of paintball, being shot so many times by so many colored bullets, mended by so many colorful people, that no one can ever look the same again.