There comes a point between drunkenness and sobriety when I can't help but remember and can't manage to forget. It's then, at that moment, that I begin to see in black and white. It's only in that loss of colour that I can truly see clearly. It's in the loss of colour that I begin to see her again, my mother.
I can see her ebony hair cascading down over alabaster skin as she presses her white fingers to the piano keys, coaxing music from the silence. As she plays, her dark shadow floats across the snowy expanse of the wall behind her as she makes the black notes come dancing off the white page, making them come alive. This is how I remember her, in black and white.
And then the moment passes and the army green starts to press in on me again. So I take another drink in an attempt to keep away the colour. But inevitably I sink too far into the darkness that awaits me and lose the glimmer of white, that fragile memory I cling to.
But for that brief fleeting second, life is paused, captured as if in a photograph. There is no colour, no crimson blood to stain our hands, no red tide which we must hold back. There are no deeper meanings. There is only a study in contrasts black and white silence and song.
I know that they think I drink to forget, and in some ways they're right. I drink to forget the colour that surrounds me. But they don't really understand. I don't drink because I want to forget. I drink so that I remember. I drink to remember life back when it was simple and uncomplicated, life before there was colour. I drink to remember a time before black was death and before white was a lost inncence.