TINA AND THE RASCALS

The World Isn’t Gray, We Just Forgot How to Look

This isn’t a story about technology — it’s a story about how we forgot how to see, and how children remind us that color is still here

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

“You’ve looked at your phone enough! Give it back, I need to check my emails.”

“Just let it finish. Just a little more.”

“Give it back now. I need it for my job.”

“Fine.”

The phone landed on the sofa with a soft thud. The screen went dark, leaving us in a room that — now that I really looked — had become completely characterless. The walls were white, the sofa beige. The shelves were bare, stripped of personality, holding nothing but a fine layer of gray dust. I caught the scent of dust from the furniture. Everything smelled of absence.

“When we were kids, we didn’t even have televisions,” I continued, staring at the blank screen. “And when the first TVs came, they were black and white. No colors. Everything on the screen was black, white, and gray.”

“How is that even possible?” he asked, eyes wide. “Where did the colors go? Where did they go if they were in the box?”

“The colors were all around us. In the flowers, in the sky, in our clothes. They just didn’t know how to make TVs that could show them. We didn’t even have one until I started school.”

The four yeas old was quiet for a moment, then pointed at the phone on the sofa.

“But you had YouTube on your phone! There are all the colors there.”

I laughed.

“There are colors there, sure. But they run on electricity. They’re there as long as you have battery. My colors — my colors were real. They faded in the sun. They stained your fingers and they were there even when the power went out.” I ran my hand along the wall beside me.

“Look around today,” I touched the gray wall, cold and smooth. “It’s like someone turned off the colors in the whole world, and nobody even noticed. Everything became beige, gray, safe.”

“It’s not gray… it’s modern,” he said seriously, probably quoting some adult.

“Modern?” I sighed.

I closed my eyes for a second, trying to pull back the memories of 1975 — the rough texture of the orange kitchen tiles under my feet, the metallic scent of my father’s mustard-yellow car on a hot summer day. Those colors didn’t just exist; they felt like a heartbeat. They were messy, vibrant, and unapologetic.

Today, everyone wants to fit in. Same black jackets, same white cars. Colors became a risk. And all the color that used to be in the world — it migrated. It found a new home. Inside our phones, our tablets, our screens.

He looked at me, then went back to his only argument:

“But I don’t have any cartoons without electricity. If it turns off, where do the colors go?”

“That’s the question we’ll explore tomorrow,” I answered. “Tomorrow, we’re going on a color hunt. Not on a screen. On the street.”

He tilted his head, confused. “But there are no colors on the street. Everything is white and gray and black. Like our car. Like your jacket.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe we just stopped looking. Tomorrow, we’ll try. We’ll look for one thing that isn’t gray, white, or black. Just one thing. And if we find it, you’ll see that colors still exist out here too. They’re just… hiding.”

He thought about it for a long moment. “And if we don’t find anything?”

“Then we’ll look again the next day. And the day after that.”

“And if we still don’t find anything? If everything is really gray?”

I looked at him — his bright eyes, his pink cheeks, his blue sweater (the only color in the room, I realized). Even in a gray world, he was a splash of blue.

“Then you win,” I said softly. “You get the phone back. And you can have your colors there.”

“Deal,” he said, and held out his tiny hand.

I shook it. His fingers were warm.

The next morning, we went out. I expected nothing — I had already convinced myself the world was gray. I was ready to hand him the phone and admit defeat.

But he stopped at the corner.

“Look!” he whispered, pointing.

A faded red bicycle, chained to a lamppost. The paint was peeling, the color had almost bleached away, but it was red. Undeniably red.

“There,” he said, looking up at me. “I found one.”

I knelt beside him. “You did.”

“And it’s not on the phone,” he said slowly, working it out in his four-year-old brain. “It’s… outside. In real life.”

“Yes.”

“So colors are still here?”

“They never left,” I said. “We just forgot to look for them.”

He nodded, accepting this like it was the simplest thing in the world. And for him, it was.

We walked another block. He found a green mailbox. Then a yellow sign. Then a purple flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk — small, almost invisible, but purple.

By noon, he had counted thirteen colors. Thirteen. In a city I had called gray.

I looked at the phone in my pocket and felt ashamed.

The colors hadn’t gone anywhere. They had just become quieter. Smaller. Easier to miss when your eyes are trained to look at a screen.

But they were still there. Waiting.

And my grandson — my four-year-old grandson who didn’t know history, who couldn’t tell you what year the first color TV was made, who thought colors lived inside phones — he saw them anyway.

Because he hadn’t forgotten how to look.

That evening, I didn’t ask for my phone back. I didn’t check my emails. I sat on the beige sofa, in the white-walled room, and I looked at him.

His blue sweater. The pink of his cheeks. The gold in his hair when the sunset hit it.

Maybe the world wasn’t gray. Maybe it was just waiting for us to remember.

And maybe the colors on the screen weren’t the enemy. Maybe they were just… borrowed. A reminder of what we used to have outside.

But the real thing — the messy, fading, imperfect real thing — was still there.

We just had to look.

May all the colors win.

Because the world isn’t gray. We just forgot how to look.

This is a sequel to my story Still Waiting to Grow Up

[embed]Still Waiting to Grow Up How an overweight Lagotto and a four-year-old’s imagination reminded me what truly mattersmedium.com

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