She has just reached another ending.
She has reached the end of the forest, where the pine trees begin to thin out, and the grasses begin to grow taller. The sky, which was just recently jet black, has begun to fade into a lighter hue of gray. The sun has risen, but she cannot seem to find it anywhere.
She has reached the ending, where everything is still lacking vibrancy, color, excitement. She is walking out of the woods, out of the chaos, out of the thorns and vines and twigs, expecting to find everything she was looking for.
But it was all black and white.
She wanders through the vastness of the field, hoping to discover some sort of color. The blindingly blue sky is nothing but a screen of haze. The tall, green grass that tickles her fingertips no longer flows with the wind. It instead crumbles beneath her touch as the beige sprinkles on her feet.
She cannot see very far—all around her is a thick fog that prevents her from seeing ahead. In this moment, she is lost. She is looking around, hoping to find some answers, some guidance, but still, there is nothing.
She waits for the day where she wishes that she was still in the in-between because by then she would have reached another ending far too bittersweet.
She has reached the in-between. The moment between an end and a beginning. It is the moment when she’s blinded by everything and doesn’t know where to look, so she sits still and waits for the fog to pass.
The problem is, however, that she hates to wait.
She hates the tight feeling in her stomach that comes along with the dreary skies. She hates thinking about the future rather than living in it. She hates being frozen in one of her least favorite moments. She hates the in-between.
Days upon days, she waits for the in-between to be behind her. She waits for time to start moving fast again, for the hands on the clock to quickly revolve around the ending she has been waiting for.
She waits for the day when she wishes that she was still in the in-between because by then, she would have reached another ending far too bittersweet.
She waits for the day when the world switches from gray-scale to blindingly vibrant. She longs for the bluest sky and the greenest grass and for a breeze to cool her down because the sun is searing her skin and kissing the freckles on her face.
She is only at the beginning of the in-between, and she cannot live the rest of her days here sitting and waiting and pinching herself every so often to make the numbness go away, even if it is just for a little while. She cannot think of it as the in-between anymore. She cannot sit in the dry, beige grass and let it swallow her whole while she looks at the sky, hoping that it will fade to blue by itself.
Instead, the in-between becomes an area for change.
While sitting in the desolate field, alone with just her thoughts to accompany her, she looks back at the past three years, where she found herself in this exact in-between. After every ending, everything stops moving. After every ending, a wave of melancholy crashes over her without any rhyme or reason, other than time is moving too slowly for her to run away from it fast enough.
This time, the in-between won’t be a mirage of black and white; it will be a mural of everything she wants to keep around.
The in-between is not as long as she makes it out to be. And once it is over, everything will slip out of her fingers before she has a chance to give it a proper goodbye. She wants to capture every moment, the beautiful and the ugly because her ending is creeping up quicker than she wants to let it.
In this moment, she chooses to love the in-between.
