Trapped: Andrew and the Grey [Part1]

Once upon an awfully insignificant point in time, there was a young boy named Andrew. Andrew lived in a little grey brick house overlooking the clear, empty river. No one else lived near the river. Sometimes, the occasional lost soul would wander by, but no one ever stayed for long. Andrew didn’t know many people and as a result was socially awkward, to say the least. Andrew was seventeen naïve years young and lived with his absent and incompetent parents, Sarah and Paul.

Paul was one of those men who could clearly be described as a ‘workaholic’. He was the sort of man who seemed to start off as a family man, focusing on his wife and son, but then retreating when things at home weren’t specifically to his liking. Now Andrew rarely saw his father and when he did, his father took no specific interest in him.

His mother, Sarah, found no solace at home and had no interest in taking up a job of her own, so she could regularly be heard saying she was off to another ladies’ book reading or perhaps a gardening club venture, though Andrew never knew for sure if she was being entirely truthful. She had quite a green thumb of her own, but could never seem to get the lovely flowers and plants she knew so well to grow in the plots of her own home. The little brick house was vacant and desolate, to say the least.

Andrew felt trapped in the grey house. On most days, he only saw his tutor, Caroline. He didn’t even know where she came from or when she was coming. Sometimes there she was and sometimes there she wasn’t. Caroline made sure he stayed out of trouble, though he could mostly do what he liked. Caroline was bearable enough, he supposed, but she couldn’t take the place of a real friend. She was just too…grey. This was what Andrew knew his life to be; grey. His nostalgia for his past life with reality instead of the pathetic, drab screenplay that was somehow forced upon him grew with each passing torturous day.

Andrew’s two best friends were two mice named Jane and Mary. Whenever he was feeling lonely or sad he brought them out for a swell time.

         Andrew was in his dreary bedroom on an unimportant Wednesday, feeling glum. He looked in the closet for his friends. He looked behind the small bed frame. He searched all over the room and felt an onset of frustration. It overwhelmed him for a moment and then he realized. He remembered where his life was. Andrew looked under his bed for Mary and Jane. They scurried out to greet him.

         “Hello my little darlings,” he whispered, crouching down to hold them in his palm. “Take me to everywhere, my sweetest lovelies.”

         The beautiful mice scampered about and all around him, swirling the world that he once thought he knew. And then, he was nothing, just a thought in the universe of nonbeing. But everything was significant. And everything was glorious to him because it was nothing; and of course, nothing is everything.