The window is empty, void of all colour, just grey, grey, grey. A grey city with grey pavement and grey brickwork and steel that rises up to meet the grey sky. Sluicing rain that frames the grey in a watery mess and makes it less real, less likely to do any damage to the colour of the person looking through the double glazing. This, like all else in the world, is nothing more than an illusion.
Slender fingers trace the path of a single raindrop the whole way from the top to the bottom, twisting and winding in all directions before clumping together with the rest of the droplets at the bottom. A seemingly endless journey that is different for every person, but in the end everyone ends up in the same place. The rain is relentless.
The truth is, and always was, that he is alone. The constant patter and a clock somewhere in the distance sentencing him to another hour in the empty room. His head is hot and the glass is cool, another raindrop reaches its counterparts and the clock gets louder. This is the extent of his awareness, and no more or less. Somehow he has relieved himself by leaning against the sill, somehow he has edged towards the window, shaking hands clutching the window's handle and pushing it outwards. The warm skin of his arm finds relief in the icy wind. His anxiety finds relief gripping the handle so hard the knuckles on his right hand are white. His mentality finds relief in the fact his arm is outside the window but not grey. Not on the outside, anyway.
The clock ticks away thirty more seconds and he knows he has little time left. There is nothing wrong physically; he is not bruised or bloody. But if experience is anything to go by, this is where it all goes downhill.
Experience, as sometimes happens, is the correct one. The age of the hinges on the door to the room he is in give away that someone is entering, and the squeak is enough to have his blood turn to ice water and stop flowing. He knows who is there, but he dares not turn around. Too many days of this same situation have ruined his curiosity, and he will never again ask who they are. Because he knows who it is. Living with someone for so long incites habits and memories that are strangely familiar only to him. He knows the sound of their breathing, the way they walk into the room. He knows exactly why they are here. He knows.
Without looking around, he pushes the window open further so that he wobbles precariously and plops down onto the seat. The clock has gotten louder, the wind rushing against his face as he hangs above the grey, still gripping the window tightly. The soft sound of boots on carpet enhances his senses, and he panics for just a moment. The ticking has been going on for twenty more seconds. He's out of time.
A deep breath that he breathes in from the bottom of his lungs is blown out periodically: the first part as he pushed the window further, legs wobbling as he stands up on the ledge and leans right out, his hands never leaving the handle, but they are clammy and sweaty and slipping. The second he reserves for when the footsteps stop behind him, and a sharp intake of breath suddenly halts the ticking from the clock he's never seen and the rain that muddles the grey. The third and last, when the person behind him speaks.
"Your fault."
And he lets go, not because his hands are slipping or they push him, but because the truth of the words is enough to knock him out of his soft, warm room of comfort and colour and back to a grey, grim reality that is the real world. If he had of been there everything would have been colourful. Instead the wind was making it too hard to see and the tears he never let fall already blurred everything into all that he could ever see anyway; no colour, no reason. Just endless falling, until the grey pavement that housed the grey brickwork and steel that rose into the grey sky came up to meet him, and everything went from grey to black.
When he woke up it was with a jolt, jumping to sitting position in a way that was not entirely conscious. The black was still there, the darkness of his room unnatural as he clutched sheets between sweaty hands and continued breathing. The bed was cold, and as he moved he noticed it was wet. Hot with shame, he rolled over onto the pillow next to his own and buried his face there. You'd never be ashamed. But you aren't here. The smell was overwhelming and it provided him comfort, but closing his eyes meant it was dark and he needed colour and light, not black and grey. He stumbled out of bed with a grimace, into the blinding light of the hallway which he always left on. Light was always within his reach, but somehow he never seemed to be able to reach it.
Two years, four months and five days. He sat alone at the bar and mulled it over with a scotch despite the fact it was 3AM and he was soaking. His fault, one part screamed. More scotch, demanded the other.
When he was done with looking at the liquid and knowing it wouldn't work, shaking fingers reached forward once more, but this time it was not to grip a handle. It was to reach the third shelf up, where he often kept the aspirin, but this time he produced a needle and a bottle of something different. Something colourful.
One prick was all it took to suck all the grey from his world, and it wasn't his fault. In fact, it was no one's fault, because the problem didn't exist. The bad dreams or the mediocre existence were no longer real. The only thing that was real was the fact that he had dulled his pain, he had turned his grey grey and cancelled it out. He was not Tony, lying on the floor of his lounge covered in sweat and tears and to blame for the only person he ever loved dying. He was not a man who had just mixed a lethal dose of drugs and alcohol, and he was not alone in the world. He was colourful. There was no grey.
There was only red.