Everything is black and white.

Everything is dull and ordinary.

Everything is built and manufactured to be the image of perfection.

Everything lacks creativity . . .

My home is a gray block, two stories tall, exactly two windows on each side for each floor, and a perfectly spaced out picket white fence around the lot.

The interior consists of clean white walls and perfect gray furniture that doesn’t have a single crease. There are no pictures or pieces of art on the wall - those were made illegal years ago - and the most interesting thing in our home is the grand piano we were gifted to make our home seem more eloquent and fancy. We weren’t allowed to play it, though, causing the keys to be covered in dust, it’s shine had long been abandoned as a light film covered the surface of the instrument.

I hated living here, and I tried to make that as evident as possible when in front of anyone who had the slightest bit of power in the government.

My mind worked differently than others, and I knew it.

While others saw a tree as a source of oxygen, a biological item meant for human use, I saw it as a flowing, living, piece of art. Staring up at the gray sky through its leaves was something I wished I could do all year, sadly they all fell during the winter. I noticed that the leaves, although completely gray, got darker or lighter during the different seasons. I wanted to know why, but everyone told me that it was not in my learning parameters to learn about the leaves.

When visiting my grandmother - which we could do twice a year, as to avoid any sort of sickness contracted with age to get to the rest of our city - I would hear her mumbling. I once got the guts to ask her what she was mumbling, and she just looked up at me with the happiest grin. Then she said a word I had never heard before.

“Music.”

When we got home, I asked my mother what that word meant. When she heard me, she looked at me like I was from another planet.

“That’s not a word, what have I told you about making things up?” She asked, quickly turning away to go to the kitchen. I tried to catch up with her, but she closed the door to the room before I had a chance to ask her any more questions.

“But I know it means something,” I whispered, the slightest hope that she could hear me leaving as I heard her turn on the oven.

My mother wouldn’t listen to me, so I didn’t dare bring the topic up with my dad. Although he was more understanding, he didn’t stand for any intolerance against the rules of the world. I once asked him why we never played the piano, his eyes lit up with fury and he grounded me for a week for even asking such a thing.

My little brother wouldn’t know anything about it, he's only ten, and none of my friends from school would be able to answer my questions. They were at the same level of learning as me.

There was only one person that knew the slightest bit about what I was trying to grasp, and that was my grandma. She was the one who had said that bizarre word, the one who mumbled to herself, the one who always talked about great painters and sculptors. My parents had always said she was talking nonsense, that she made up words, but I knew that she was telling the truth.

What reason would she have to lie?

“Grandmother?” I asked as I walked inside her home. It was difficult getting here, I had to walk all the way across town, convince the guard that I was given the blessing to use our last family pass of the year to visit her, and then actually get through the maze that was her elders home.

“Is that a little grandaughter?” She asked, and I smiled as I saw the light in her eyes appear again as I rushed over and gave her a great big hug. There was a quick shush from the people around us, and one of the nurses cleared her throat. Hugging wasn’t allowed, but the staff had gotten used to me not exactly following that rule.

“What’s brought you here so early? I wasn’t expecting that pretty little face of yours until summer holiday,” she said, and I smiled as I sat down next to her.

She was getting old, wrinkles covered her face, and her eyes were sunk in. Her white hair was everywhere, but she still somehow managed to make it work. She was in a wheel chair, yet she seemed to enjoy it as she rolled herself back and forth in excitement.

“That word you told me the last time I was here,” I said, and she nodded.

“Music,” she said with a smile, and a look on her face I had never seen before. It was like she was looking back on an old memory.

“Why do you want to ask about that?” She asked.

“Something tells me you already know,” I said, and she snickered, coughing slightly at the end, before looking out the window. “I know that I’m missing something, I don’t know what it is, but there’s something out there that’s being kept from us,” I said, and she put a hand on my knee, silently telling me to calm down.

“There are many things that your generation is missing,” she said softly.

“But you know what I mean, what’s being kept from me?” I asked, and that’s when she stopped. Her eyes glanced over to the nurses around us, they were all busy, and then to the other residents, none of them had good enough hearing to tell we were speaking.

“Something that was a very simple concept when I was your age,” she started, taking a breath as she closed her eyes. She was trying to remember something. Whether it be a word or an image, she was trying to remember.

“Something that I wanted to be my life, I wanted to make it my career, but they wouldn’t let me,” she said sadly.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Art.”