“When the Sky Forgot Its Color”

When the Sky Forgot Its Color

By[Ali Rehman]

There was a morning when the sky woke up and forgot its color.

The world did not end — it simply dimmed.

The blue that used to hum softly above me had drained away overnight, leaving behind a dull, aching gray. The kind of gray that wasn’t angry, wasn’t sad — just tired.

Like the heavens themselves had stopped trying.

The trees still stood, the wind still moved, but everything looked blurred, as if seen through glass fogged by breath. The birds still sang, but their notes fell heavy, muffled — like a record warped by time.

And in that colorless world, I moved like a ghost.

I made coffee that tasted like dust.

I looked into mirrors that did not answer back.

Days folded into one another like blank pages in a forgotten book.

It wasn’t that I wanted to disappear. It was that I already had.

I used to believe color was eternal — that blue skies were promises, not privileges. That light would always return if I waited long enough.

But waiting became its own kind of sorrow.

Each dawn looked identical to the last — pale, tired, uncommitted. Even the sun seemed to hesitate before rising, dragging itself across the horizon with the reluctance of someone who no longer believed in morning.

Inside my chest, there was a silence that echoed louder than thunder.

I tried to paint, once — to bleed color back into the world. I dipped my brush into what I thought was blue, but the canvas only swallowed it. Every hue I touched turned gray the moment it met the air. I began to wonder if the world had forgotten color because I had.

Then one day, the wind changed.

It came not as a storm, but as a whisper — the faintest breeze through my half-open window.

It carried something strange with it: a scent of rain that hadn’t fallen, a memory of laughter I hadn’t heard in years.

It made the curtains dance. And for a moment, I almost saw it — a flicker of color.

Not blue. Not red. Something in between — a shy kind of light.

I stepped outside for the first time in weeks. The air was sharp and honest. The grass beneath my feet felt unfamiliar, like stepping into someone else’s dream.

There was a child down the street chasing a balloon — a small, round thing that might have been red once, though it was hard to tell in the gray light. The balloon slipped from his hand and drifted upward, into the empty sky.

I watched it rise until it vanished.

And something in me — something small and half-broken — rose with it.

That night, I dreamt in color for the first time in months.

The dream was strange — the sky above me was still gray, but beneath it bloomed a thousand tiny lights, like stars that had fallen and decided to live among the flowers. They whispered to me in colors I couldn’t name.

They said, “You are not lost. You are paused.”

When I woke, I cried. Not out of sadness, but relief — like water finally finding its river again.

The next morning, I noticed something new: the faintest blue, shyly peeking at the edges of the sky. It wasn’t much — a whisper of hue, a timid return — but it was there.

And that was enough.

Recovery did not arrive like a sunrise. It came in fragments — in uneven breaths, in mornings when I could almost taste hope but not quite hold it.

Some days the sky forgot its color again. But now, I remembered what it felt like to look up anyway.

I began to keep small promises to myself:

To water the plant I thought was dead.

To open the window even when it rained.

To listen to songs that hurt, because at least they made me feel.

Bit by bit, the world began to remember itself.

The birds sounded clearer. The wind carried laughter again. The trees began to glow faintly green at their tips, as if the earth were shyly reintroducing herself to me.

And one evening — I don’t know when or how — I looked up and saw it: the sky, bluer than I remembered, wide and alive.

It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t permanent. But it was mine.

Now, when I see a gray morning, I don’t fear it. I sit with it. I know it’s not the end — just a breath between colors.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still feel that version of me who walked through the colorless days, weightless and lost.

But I thank her. Because she kept walking, even when there was no map.

The sky may forget its color again — maybe tomorrow, maybe years from now.

But I won’t forget mine.

I carry it now, deep inside, like a pulse of quiet light.

Because even when the sky forgets its color, the heart remembers how to paint.