When a person is born, the universe aligns their soul to match that of someone else. Out of eight billion people, those two are destined to be together. Destined to spend the rest of their days holding each other and wondering just how they had gotten so lucky as to find each other.
Lucky, because many, most, even, don't get past that first step: looking. They spend their days searching through the colorless world, looking and searching for the only person who could ever complete them. They roam around, as lost as a bird taken from its nest by a storm, waiting for that moment.
That moment.
That moment when their world won't just be grey. That moment when they can see the colors so few have ever witnessed and turn to see the person who turned them on.
All it takes is a single glance. The smallest, quickest look is all you need to complete your destiny. And yet, it's the hardest things anyone has had or will ever have to do.
Even then, if you do reach the point where every hint of blue, every whisper of green is revealed, it can be taken away in a second. A day. A year.
The moment your soulmate takes their last breath, everything is undone. All the work, all the effort you went through to find the colors, to find them, is suddenly for naught. No one knows why, but the world goes grey again.
Some say it's part of the curse (or the gift; it's all in how you see it, really). That just getting to experience the colors and the love for however long is too great a thing, so the world immediately starts to turn against you.
I never thought it was tied to anything. I just figured that, when you've lost your everything, even what once seemed to consume all your thoughts and time fades. Even something as precious as colors.
A lot of people, like my mom, don't make it for very long after their soulmate dies. Something inside them snaps and they lose the will to live. The whole week leading up to her death, my mom was moaning about an ache in her heart.
They said her heart wasn't receiving enough blood, but I think that it was just broken.
Two weeks later, I was the only one to attend her funeral. The only one still huddled over her grave, on a day when the sun was shining to brightly and the colorless flowers were swaying to peacefully.
That was the moment I knew, with a clear certainty, that I would meet my soulmate. I would fall in love, and I would see colors.
And I, Daniel James Howell, would never leave them.
Okay, important: from now on, Dan will be normal because that's how it started out, Phil will be italic because it's v aesthetic and makes me happy, and I will be bold because I wiLL nOt bE SiLeNcED