Grey Filter

When the color leaves quietly, and you’re the only one who notices.

Artwork By: Shain Parwiz

The color drained out somewhere along the road.

Didn’t notice it at first.

Didn’t even feel it leave.

Now everything’s just variations on a single, dead fucking note.

Grey.

Not the soft, misty kind either.

The grinding, concrete-dust kind. The kind that sticks in your teeth, coats your tongue, makes every breath taste like regret.

They point at the sky, at trees, at people’s faces, say “beauty.”

All I see is the same flat, dead static.

Nothing catches. Nothing shines.

Everything just sits there, inert. Ash pretending to be alive.

The world’s a stage built from static and remains.

And I’m just sleepwalking through the script,

one act, no climax, no encore.

Lost in the middle of the frame,

isolated even when the air is thick with other people’s heat and noise.

The loneliest place isn’t emptiness.

It’s right fucking here.

Inside this skin that doesn’t fit anymore.

A hollow room.

Echoes that aren’t mine bouncing off the walls like cross-examinations.

Each one louder than anything real.

Tired.

Not just tired, excavated.

Paper-thin.

The scaffolding of me creaks with every breath,

One cough from collapse.

The mirror is the daily reckoning.

Stare into it.

Challenge it.

See who cracks first.

But the reflection doesn’t break.

It just looks back,blank, chipped-stone eyes,

a stranger in my skin.

No recognition. No flicker.

Just the same question hanging in the stillness:

Who the fuck even are you?

The silence answers.

It always answers.

It scrapes and grinds, stretching the day like dental wire across nerve.

They talk about rainbows.

About light at the end of the tunnel.

About hope.

Fuck that.

I’ve looked.

All that’s there is more shadow.

More weight pressing down until my bones want to split from the inside.

Grief like flaking paint.

Pain like a sucker punch you schedule and still can’t brace for.

The point of it all?

Gone.

Dissolved like sugar in poisoned water.

No sweetness left. Just the aftertaste — bitter, clinging, permanent.

Just the mirror.

The chipped eyes staring back.

The courtroom quiet.

The grey.

Author’s Note:

I wrote this one in a quiet moment that felt like eternity.

It’s not about giving up.

It’s about naming the texture of a day that won’t let you breathe,

and realizing sometimes, the mirror fights back.

If you’re sitting in the silence right now,I see you.

Not with answers. Just with company.

Thank you so much being here.

-Shain