Chapter 1. COLOR
Yellow.
Ryan doesn’t like many colors.
Red is too loud.
Blue is too cold.
Black is too heavy.
But yellow—
yellow makes his days bearable.
It became his favorite color long before he understood why.
Not because it is beautiful,
but because when the world grows too noisy—when people argue, when problems pile up without mercy—yellow seems to soften everything.
It does not erase chaos.
It simply slows it down.
His room is bathed in dim yellow light.
His books are wrapped in yellow covers.
Most of his pens are yellow.
To others, it is strange.
To Ryan, it is survival.
---
That night, his mind was crowded with questions.
Thoughts overlapping, circling endlessly.
One question refused to let go:
Is it true that only yellow makes life tolerable?
He didn’t sleep in his room that night.
Instead, he lay in the living room, flooded with white light—so bright that darkness had no place to exist.
Yet it was not darkness that haunted him.
It was the white itself.
His heart raced.
His skin grew damp.
The silence felt sharp.
He fled back to his room, collapsed onto the bed with yellow sheets, and stared at the dark ceiling as his breathing slowly returned to normal.
As his eyes began to close, he realized something unsettling—
Once again,
yellow had saved him
---
Ryan lay still, listening to the quiet hum of the night.
The yellow light did not demand anything from him.
It did not ask him to think faster, feel stronger, or become better.
It simply allowed him to exist.
He wondered if people misunderstood comfort.
Maybe comfort was never about happiness.
Maybe it was about finding something that does not fight back when the world does.
White light wanted clarity.
Red wanted urgency.
Blue wanted depth.
Yellow wanted nothing—
and in that nothing, Ryan found balance.
His thoughts slowed, no longer crashing into one another.
Questions remained, but they lost their sharp edges.
For the first time that night, uncertainty felt harmless.
As sleep finally pulled him under, Ryan understood something small yet profound:
Life doesn’t need to be bright to be meaningful.
Sometimes, it only needs to be gentle.
And for him,
gentleness had a color.
