12/10/3397

Everything is a shade of black.  If you really think about it.  An optimist will probably tell you that everything is actually a shade of white, but I am not an optimist.  Not that I’m overly pessimistic about everything or anything like that, I’m just not an optimist.  I don’t see the world as a place full of unicorns and rainbows.  I think I have a fairly realistic view on the world.  Things happen all the time that just aren’t perfect.

But back to colors.

How is everything a shade of black?  Well, take, for example, any color.  Say, vibrant blue.  Now in your mind, dim that blue.  Make it darker and darker.  Eventually, your vibrant blue will be so dark it will be black.  And that’s how everything works.  Eventually even the most beautiful color can be made so dark that it is black.  Eventually, even the brightest star will burn out.  Eventually, even the greatest of people dies…

        I sighed.  It was no use.  I understood why they wanted me to do it.  To write a journal about colors.  I had agreed to do it for them, too.  I had nothing better left.

        They wanted me to clear my mind so that I could be part of their experiment.  They didn’t want me thinking too much about the past.  About what they had done to my family.  So they wanted me to think about something insubstantial—colors—and write journals about it, because they thought that would help me relax.  But it wasn’t working.  They said I was almost there—wherever ‘there’ was—but I knew I wasn’t.  Whenever I was able to lose myself in the writing I would find myself making constant references back to what happened.  What they did.

Either they were stupid enough not to notice, or they were smart enough to pretend I wasn’t doing anything I wasn’t supposed to be doing.  I wasn’t quite sure yet which it was, but as much as I wanted to think of them as the good guys, I was pretty sure it was the second.  After all, they didn’t usually kill for no reason.  And they had saved me.  Or, at least, not killed me.

They wanted me for something.  I didn’t know for what, or why, but they definitely wanted me for something.  And in my state of shock when they had found me, I had agreed to help them.  That meant that they would use me for their experiment whether I mastered the peaceful art of writing about colors or not.  The journals were for their benefit, not mine.  To get me to trust them.

Well, I didn’t trust them, at all, but there was nothing I could do about it.  They thought I trusted them, and they needed me, and for now I needed them, too.  They had destroyed my home; I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.

Yes, they were turning a blind eye to my recollections and realizations so that they seemed less suspicious to me.  They were hoping that if they did not respond to me, I would think this was some passing whim of mine and let it go.  I saw now that the two main purposes of the journals were to gain my trust and spy on my thoughts at the same time.

I didn’t trust them, but there was nothing I could do about it.  I had agreed to help them, and once you agree to help the SSG, there is no going back on it.  If you say you are going to help, you are going to help.

Unless, of course, you wanted to die painfully.  And I didn’t.

I sighed again.  Nothing else for me to do.  I turned off the lights and went to sleep.

To be continued…