We're supposed to be writing an essay on the importance of colors right now. Supposedly for the purpose of determining what potions should look like in various states of completion.

But since Potions isn't my favorite class, I can't bring myself to try too terribly hard to mend my Marauder-like ways and buckle down. An essay on colors. On colors.

As if I could see them.

Seeing as how dogs are colorblind. Seeing as how wolves are colorblind.

Seeing as how werewolves are colorblind.

Not much of a surprise then that I fail to be less than stellar in Potions since so much of it depends on identifying something I have no prayer of ever seeing. I have vague recollections, of course. A faint memory of what blue looked like since the walls in my room were once painted in various shades of it. And I have a particularly vivid memory of red, the blood welling up on my finger tip after having spilt the skin open on one of the rough shards of a plate I broke by accident.

But those are all memories of a life I've long since left behind. That was the human me. The me that was well and truly alive. Even if it was for such a brief period of time.

The thing that they don't like to tell you about dark creatures is that we live in the twilight between life and death. Just alive enough to feel pain, but not enough to exist in the same bright places that living creatures spend all their time. I can look at James or Sirius or even Peter and see that there is something there, something tangible, that I'm missing. Something I can't even begin to fathom or understand, and never will. Because there is no way I'll ever experience it for myself.

I look again at the list of colors that we're supposed to be typifying. I suppose that all I really would have to do is look up the various potions we've worked up so far this year and identify which ones are supposed to turn which color based on our readings.

But why should I? It's an exercise in futility if I'll never see it for myself.

The only color I can see is gray. My whole world is a dizzying array of grays.

The Gryffindor red curtains of my bed…A dark smoky charcoal. Severus' rich green robes…a dull matted lead. Sirius' blue eyes…a pale shiny silver.

Sirius asked me once what my favorite color was. I don't remember what answer I gave him, some random shade, assuredly. How could I tell him that my favorite color was gray? Whose favorite color is something as dull, unimaginable, as colorless as gray? And how was I supposed to admit to liking the gray of the ethereal mist of the ghosts over the slimy gray of the porridge he has for breakfast?

How was I supposed to explain to him that all my color had was texture to lend itself to favoritism?

He's Sirius. So of course I couldn't find an adequate way to describe it to him. His life is color. Vibrant colors that bleed over into everyone and everything he comes in contact with.

And my life?

My life can only be experienced in shades of gray. I live in a gray world, with gray people and gray animals. Gray afternoon skies with white fluffy clouds, and gray sunrises that come up over gray, grassy hillocks.

I'll most likely end up old and alone, living in a gray room with a gray bed and only a small gray cat to keep me company.

I'm human, but inexplicably alien. I belong, but I'm not quite accepted. I will always live on the outskirts of life. Alive, but in a fantastical parody of the act.

I can see in sharp relief all the textures of the world surrounding me, from the soft fuzz of velveteen to the slick smoothness of the silver crucifix that hangs around my mother's neck.

But I only see one color.

Gray.