A Yellow Adventure

Yellow’s one of those funny colours. You get the clever colours like purple and brown, and the serious colours like red and black, and the colours that don’t really fit in like green, and then you get the funny colours, like yellow. It could never be described as a serious colour and certainly never clever. Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t fit, but who doesn’t? Anyway, it was one of those days when things just don’t sit right. Like when you wake up in the morning, have a wash, get dressed, eat your breakfast, clean your teeth and then you wake up, realising that it was all a dream and that you have to do it all over again. That’s the sort of feeling you can’t easily shake. It was one of those mornings and yellow had decided that actually, he wasn’t going to play ball. Instead of sticking to his own territory and doing his job to the best of his ability, he decided to take over black!

Now it’s a common misconception that black can easily overpower yellow; put them in a ring together and black will always come out on top. The actual truth is that, as colours go, you don’t get much harder than yellow! The key thing is that yellow is just a little too easy going and will let most colours get their own way, except for white of course, but no one likes white! Well, as it happened, on this particular strange morning, yellow had determined that it was time to make a move, and had done so on black of all colours. He hadn’t gone for an easy target like orange, maybe that would have solved a lot of the problems that were to follow. He’d gone for the king of the colour jungle so to speak! Now even all this wouldn’t have really made a lot of difference, if it weren’t for Zeke.

Here’s the way it is. Most colours actually change on a regular basis. Rarely will a day go by without blue and pink deciding to have another exchange, it makes life that little bit more interesting. The only colours that can’t change are white and black, because they are exact opposites and so must balance each other out. Without these boundaries the world of colour could evaporate from existence. Now you may be thinking, ‘Hang On! If colours are changing on a daily basis then why aren’t I noticing them?’ A good and fair question if ever there was one. The reason is the little part of your brain called the tri-balanced colorode. The tri-balanced colorode constantly updates the colour in your memory, using the images received through your eyes. This means that on a daily basis your memories are changing to fit the current place of colours, so you never notice that anything is out of place. This is where Zeke comes in. You see Zeke was born without a tri-balanced colorode. Just a tiny little hole where the tbc should be. Now on a normal day this just meant for a rather exciting morning. Walking to school is never dull when every single day it looks completely different. Imagine it just for a second. Stop reading and picture your journey to school with all the things that you probably miss because you’ve seen them so many times. Now imagine that the bin on the corner of your road is bright pink, and that the tarmac on the road is a soft green, and that the grass in people’s gardens is dark blue. It would be enough to make you giggle and smile all the way to school. Unfortunately for Zeke, most people thought him a little strange for laughing and giggling to himself on dull winter’s mornings when the wind was up and the sky grey. Now over time, Zeke had come to realise that black and white never actually moved around. He kinda just took it as a given that his school shirt would always be white and his trousers black. You can imagine the horror of a thirteen year-old boy, suddenly discovering half way to school that his trousers were bright yellow! Not a pleasant moment in the young man’s life. And you see this was where the problem really began to take shape. The human brain was never really meant to deal with the endless switching of colours and although Zeke had borne the situation well under the switching of the lower orders, he just wasn’t equipped to deal with the movement of a foundation colour.

Had you been sitting on the bus stop bench at the corner of Claremont and Newgate at half past eight on that Tuesday morning, an interesting sight would have met your eyes. First the strange smiley giggly boy comes along, almost skipping down the road. Then, as he reaches the point exactly opposite you, he looks down and a look of terrific despair envelops his face. And then . . . he disappears!

Zeke’s mind had done an unprecedented thing. The yellow over black had been the straw that broke the camel’s back, forcing his brain to try and make sense of the madness. Unfortunately for Zeke, his brain had taken him to the only place left for him to go; the centre of the sun!

The world in which we live is nothing more than a web of clever sounding myths. Man reaches as far as his knowledge will take him and then to save face he just makes stuff up. I mean, how can something just keep burning forever? It doesn’t work. If it did then why don’t we try and capture a bit of the sun and then our fuel problems would be solved. The reason the sun burns and burns is because it’s got no other way to release all the energy that’s bounding around inside its hollow shell. You see, the sun is the centre of the universe because it’s where all the stuff that makes life life, lives. The sun is the home of the abstracts. Our sight our smell our taste, all reside in the sun. Our emotions, our dreams, even our colours all live inside. I think in some strange way, Zeke’s mind was taking him to the only place where the problem could even attempt to be thought of being solved. Only Zeke didn’t know that. You wouldn’t know if you were inside the sun just like you wouldn’t know if you were inside an elephant. Unless of course you had entered through an opening and even scientists know that the sun doesn’t have any of those!

At first Zeke was a little overwhelmed. A bit like putting your head into a walnut, only the opposite and bigger. His senses were assaulted so much that they just shut down. For the first time in his life Zeke knew what it felt like to be a vacuum. It was as if he was sitting, watching himself not existing. Eventually, his senses returned with the power of a small rhinoceros sat behind the wheel of an armoured truck. That was when he came face to face with the culprit. Unbeknown to Yellow, who, unsatisfied after his assault on black, was making his way over to the realm of the white, he was about to meet the one entity that could challenge his plans of invasion. Their paths collided and yellow, reacting with the sort of speed you might expect from mauve, turned and faded into a tree. Oh yes, there are trees in the middle of the sun. It’s not like how you’d imagine the inside of your brain to be or even like sitting in a giant peach. It wasn’t even that bright! Anyway, Yellow was gone and Zeke was left alone in his now pink trousers. He took that to be a bad sign! He decided to climb the nearest windmill to see if he could spot any clue as to the escape route of the rogue. The windmill smelt like strawberries and cream and he enjoyed immensely his journey up the blades to the walkway by the roof. The railing was also a pretty shade of pink and Zeke couldn’t help wondering to himself if maybe it hadn’t once looked better in black. The view from the windmill was nothing short of spectacular. He felt a bit like he was inside a giant snow globe, with trees and flowers and rivers and flying turtles and mountains and giant umbrellas and cities of dew. Suddenly the reality of the situation hit Zeke (if you could call it reality!) and he slumped down against the side of the windmill roof. “What should I do?” he asked himself desperately.

“Absolutely nothing,” came the reply from over his shoulder.
Now Zeke had seen more than a few strange things in the past few minutes and so he decided not to bother looking round because he probably wouldn’t believe what he saw anyway. Instead, he thought for a second.
“Why should I do nothing, is it because I can’t really do anything anyway?”
“Now which question would you like me to answer first?” was the prompt response.
“The second one please,” even sat atop a windmill at the centre of the sun, Zeke really was a very polite young man.
“Well then, there are in fact a great many things that you could choose to do that might impact the outcome of this difficult situation.”
Zeke liked that answer, “oh, that’s good, why should I do nothing then?”
“The reason why you should do nothing is because you’ve done nothing so far and you’ve travelled a great deal closer to your destination as a result. Therefore, the sensible course of action would be to continue doing exactly what is working so very well . . . nothing!”
Zeke couldn’t help smiling as he realized the logic in his new friends suggestion.
“That sounds like very good advice, thank you Mr…what is your name by the way?”
“I have many names really, but I think the one that’ll interest you most is…yellow!” Zeke turned to see yellow flee with all the vigour of a caged bird set free. What a clever little fellow, Zeke thought to himself, still claiming the smile that even yellow’s trickery couldn’t steal. He was however now faced with a dilemma; should he stay or should he go?

Yellow had advised him to stay but obviously yellow didn’t want to be caught so staying would be exactly the advice you might expect him to give. However, yellow revealed himself and so would probably expect Zeke to ignore the advice he’d given so he might have given the best advice after all, knowing it would be ignored. Having thought it over for a short while, Zeke concluded that the very best course of action would be to do both. To stay and to go. To do absolutely everything and absolutely nothing. Using the sort of logic that only exists within a thirteen year old missing a tri-balanced colorode, Zeke decided that he had two options. He could either do absolutely everything whilst thinking of absolutely nothing, or do absolutely nothing whilst thinking about absolutely everything. Now Zeke had always found trying to think about nothing a bit like turning yourself inside out only to find that there’s nothing really to look at when you’re heads stuck in your bellybutton, so he chose the latter. He remained seated, crossed his legs and folded his arms (cos everyone knows that’s the position you have to be in if you’re going to do absolutely nothing). Then he allowed a train to pull into the station of his mind, hopped aboard and grabbed a window seat, letting the journey begin; and what a journey it was!

To describe it is like trying to tie your shoelaces with your hair, pretty pointless but amusing all the same, so here goes. First the train explored his sense of smell, by sucking his nostrils to the flat of the glass and then splattering various objects against it. All this was fairly pleasant until a whiff of fresh flowers caused him to sneeze and because the snot couldn’t escape through the glass it shot back into his head, causing it to escape through his hair follicles like plasticine shoved through a colander. This meant the end of the smells and the beginning of the sounds. If you’ve ever heard a duck trying to land on an iced over pond then you’re familiar with the sound furthest away from what Zeke was hearing! I think it sounded like cheese. After a quick sojourn in the lands of taste and touch, he finally reached his destination; the land of sight. Right before his eyes, everything began to change. No matter what colour the object began: be it the horse, the cart, the monkey; all Zeke could see began to fade to a lighter shade of yellow. Acting purely on instinct, he held out his hands and clapped them shut around the image. Opening his eyes again he looked down and saw yellow fighting to escape from his firm grip. Zeke’d caught him! All that remained was for yellow to be returned to his rightful place. Easier done than said!


The end?