Monologue in Blue

220111202 Zora 高兴

I am a fragment of blue, a hue forgotten by the sky and left to slumber in the ocean.

I once belonged to the sea—a fleeting shimmer on the crest of a wave, a sigh woven into the tides. Back then, I had no shape, no boundaries, only carried by the wind to the clouds or swept by the rain into the sea. I flowed through the songs of whales and lingered in the dreams of coral. I thought I would live in calm, without a single ripple—until one day, a human hand scooped me up and sealed me inside a transparent glass bottle.

“What a beautiful blue,” she murmured, her fingertips tapping lightly against the glass, producing a crisp, delicate sound.

As I expected, I became a prisoner on her windowsill. Perhaps, as humans believe, I—the color blue—not just a hue but also a symbol of melancholy and sorrow.

Her room was unnervingly quiet. In the afternoons, sunlight would slant in, stretching my shadow long across the surface. She often sat hunched over her desk, writing, occasionally sipping coffee, sometimes pausing abruptly to stare at me in silence. People called her a writer—though in her notebooks, the erased words far outnumbered those left behind. When her fingers stirred me, I felt the calluses from years of holding a pen and the faint tremors hidden in her knuckles, accumulated over countless sleepless nights. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but her eyes reflected my color, like tiny lakes. Don’t humans have many emotions? Joy, anger, sorrow, delight, grief.

Why is she always surrounded by sorrow?

She would sit like this, motionless, for entire days. Late at night, she perched by the window, absentmindedly tracing the curve of the bottle. Under the moonlight, her tears dripped onto the glass, merging with my ripples. Why was she always so wistful? I longed to embrace her, but—you must understand—I was nothing more than trapped water.

“If only I could become rain,” she said to me one day, suddenly. “Then I could fall freely, evaporate, and fall again… cycling endlessly, unbound.” With that, she returned to her writing, the scratch of his pen filling the silence.

With the passage of seasons, she appeared less and less by the window, until eventually, she drew the heavy curtains shut. Dust gradually settled over me, and sunlight grew sparse. Darkness enveloped me, and I began to dream—of breaking free from the glass, evaporating into mist, then condensing into a dewdrop on some distant morning, landing upon her eyelashes.

Then, on a certain winter day, she pulled open the thick curtains and pushed up the long-closed window. A bitter wind howled in, turning her fingertips red with cold, yet she gently unscrewed the bottle’s cap.

“Go—your sky is elsewhere,” she whispered.

In that moment, I felt the long-lost caress of the wind. But what about her? Her voice was as it had always been—calm, yet tinged with sorrow.

I couldn’t hesitate. I began to evaporate, to rise, stretching into formless blue in the frigid air. Through the thinning mist, I saw her face tilted upward, saw the tears finally spilling from her eyes.

I never understood why she wasn’t free—yet she had given me freedom. All along, she had been preparing for this silent farewell.

Now, I drift above the city, sometimes becoming rain, sometimes snow. Let me become her rain—to fall as a raindrop, cycling forever, over and over.

Only occasionally, when the sun sets in the west, a certain window reflects a familiar light, and it seems as if I catch a glimpse of her figure. She appears to smile and tell me—blue is no longer melancholy, but rather like a bird—soaring freely between heaven and earth.