RED

 The sky outside looked like the palette of an artist experimenting with shades of blue and grey with the occasional strokes of bright orange hinting at the sunset. Inside the class, in front of me was the pastel green board embellished with the vibrant assortment of coloured chalks. A line here, a formula there, a diagram there. The room was littered with benches of the most dusty and dappled shade of brown, probably because of the numerous children doing calculations and having conversations on the tabletop in pencil to later erase away. The floor, a washed-out grey, had deformations in it, from the bottles that were dropped on the floor, from the scuff marks off the shoes of the students. The walls were painted with mellow colours, all complementing each other, giving out a feeling of peace and calm.

And here they came, just about in time to ruin that peace and calm. They were wearing the most showy colours that just put too much strain on your eyes. Carrying bags matching their splashy colour taste. They were almost too painful to look at, so I decided to look out to the pure and soft sky. 

“Have you looked at her? Always wearing such dull and baggy clothes.”

“I know. I’m pretty sure she wears clothes two sizes too large because she can’t find good clothes to fit her.”

Without even turning my head, I knew they were talking about me. It was always someone. And today their raffle had my name on it. 

“Dude have you seen her legs, they are so fat, it’s a wonder she can fit on these benches.”

As much as I wanted to block out their apparent hushed criticism from reaching my ears, their giggles were still shrill enough to get implanted in my brain, always nagging me whenever I tried to show even a modicum of self-respect. 

“And her face! Is it acne on her face or a little face in the acne!”

The previously soothing to look at sky started to get covered by dark dreary, grey clouds. Forcing out all fiery orange rays of the setting sun. 

“She should wear shoes with fatter soles. Amusement parks must be a bore for her.”

“Huh, why?”

“She wouldn’t be allowed on half the rides because she doesn’t reach the minimum height requirement.”

The teacher enters and wipes away all the warm colours from the board, leaving it pale green and empty. 

“I don’t understand how she even got in here, she isn’t talented enough or smart enough.”

All the colours started fading around me, tinted by my insecurities, being washed away by others' constant ridicule. It all kept degrading until it was nothing. There was just an absence. An absence of colours, everything was black. 

“Yeah, she doesn’t belong here.”

And all of a sudden, there was no black, no white, no shades of gray area in between. All I could see now was red. 

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I wrote this piece because I wanted to write something that would make people feel, make them think. And I wanted to do something involving colours since a long time. I was given a suggestion to make this a part of a series. I don't know when I will be able to write the said series, and I kinda wanted to share this now. I was quite hesitant to share this particular one. Anyone who knows me even the slightest would assume this is from personal experience. It is not. Although I can't deny going through stuff like this, but I have, fortunately, never felt as intense as I tried to portray. There is a lot of creative embellishments because as I mentioned, I wanted to write something about an emotion so ordinary that many people must go through on a seemingly daily basis, and present it in such a way that made people dwell on it.