Sometimes the world seems like it's black and white to me — monochrome and colorless, as if someone has taken a vacuum and sucked all the color from it. Melancholy darkens a room aglow with the morning's sunlight and leaves the curtains closed. It kisses the walls with cold lips and seals mouths that have yet to lighten the weight on someone's shoulders.

The room dims, and the mood lowers.

Repressed thoughts suddenly come to mind, and for some reason, it's all just plain sad.

There's no obvious reason for me to feel this way. It's not like I just broke off ties with someone I loved or finished a tragic drama that had kept the tears running down my face until the very end.

I don't know. It sometimes feels like the most literal and heaviest feeling in the world, then it decides to hollow me out at the end until I'm nothing more than an empty husk who can't feel. I'm not prepared for it at all — it crashes into me and knocks all the breath from my lungs before I can even notice its presence.

Sometimes I tell myself that it's going to pass just as quickly as it came, like a visiting breeze that never lasts long on a hot summer day. I sometimes tell myself that I might be imagining that feeling of sadness... that if I just close my eyes and breathe in deeply, it might disappear as if it was never there in the first place. If I'm lucky, I might convince myself of this thought and play along with it even though it isn't true.

The thoughts are still there. I can still feel them whispering with my own voice in my mind, forcing me to ruminate on them. It can be raining outside and the pitter patter of rain can be tapping rhythmically on my window to remind me that I'm completely sane and grounded in reality, but even that noise can't chase away the sadness. I'll reach out to feel the rain on my hand, wishing that it will comfort me, but each droplet feels like a needle is piercing my skin. It feels like if I stay like that for too long, I'll have so many holes in me that everyone will be able to see all the thoughts that go through my mind.

The rain seems more like something that I should ignore, but I know it's impossible. Even if I cower under the safety of an umbrella, the rain will somehow find a way to touch me. It can be that my shoes and socks will be soaked through before I fully escape it or that one shoulder is neglected by my umbrella. Perhaps I can still hide how open the rain makes me, but if someone stands close enough, they would be able to feel my shivers.

When I see the world through a dark filter, I just want to be alone until the feeling passes.

Sometimes when I rest for a bit with the rain carrying me away to a dreamless sleep, I can open my eyes to the sunlight streaming through the closed curtains. The melancholy leaves me, and the world saturates with color again. A rainbow greets me when I pull the curtains apart.

Then, I'm reminded that the sadness doesn't last.

It never does.