The stares, felt on my skin as if being pricked a dozen times by a needle

One dozen pricks per penetrating glance

Noticed by me in my peripheral, but ignored by choice.

We walk side by side

Like we have a secret very few are able to piece together

Our bond, strong, obvious, yet the gazes of the colorblind glaze over it

“It can’t be grey, it’s either black or white

Those are the only colors to be seen, right?”

Grey would be an unfamiliar mix of the only two colors they have been trained to see

Or rather, the only ones they have chosen to see.

Their monotonous worlds suddenly confused when we tread by,

Like mother and daughter should.

But something’s off

We lack that matching feature, leaving our relationship too ridiculous to find credible.

People the color red come to speak to me in their red language

Mistaking me as red

I reply, to their surprise, in my own language.

I speak to them in a mixture, my tongue like Picasso,

Rearranging the structure to my liking,

An interesting picture must be it to see

They scramble to piece together my words

They can’t help but ask, what am I?

What am I?

Again, I reply in sentences, too abstract for them to comprehend

Making them bend their consciousness in ways unimagined

They speak amongst their red tongues, scrutinizing the way we are

When they finally figure it out, they ask me to choose,

Which color am I more like?

As if I can simply just divide myself to their liking,

So they can go back to their black or white lives knowing I am one or the other.

What am I?

I am a mixture, I am neither simply black nor white nor red nor any other color in the spectrum

Art. I remember the lessons taught to me as a child about the color wheel.

The lessons about primary colors, secondary, tertiary

Why did no one grasp that the concept applied as much to people

What am I?
I am grey.

No longer do I draw in black ink onto white paper or white chalk on a black board

To simplify my story.

I shade in every drawing, give it dimension, make it fat with character, complicate it

Darker in some areas, lighter in others

Because what fun is it to stare

At the same two colors when there’s a whole rainbow

Begging to show itself

So I walk past the gazes and gasps and gaping mouths of the generations

Who can’t seem to grasp that there is more than just black and white.

I walk with my mother and father, both from opposite ends of the color wheel

Who have seen the rainbow show off it’s colors

Me, the work of art created from the vibrant colors, invisible to the masses.