She stared through the glass at the columns and rows of eggs, stacked neatly in their chilly resting place. So many different kinds, so many prices. She wondered why she had never noticed this before. She reached for the one she always bought – styrofoam container, white shells, lowest price. Comfortable. Prudent. Who in their right mind would think otherwise? (Suckers!)
She was so busy these days with work, her family, with keeping up her life, that there really just wasn’t enough time or space in her brain for reevaluation. Life was easier on autopilot. Food for thought…now who was cooking that for dinner? (Too many dishes, she told herself. Not worth the energy.) Her accomplishments served to validate her choices – people always accepted her business card (hell, she even gave one to herself one time) and she never had the need – let alone time – to create a budget like some people. The black and white latex balloons her husband bought for her birthday filled with helium and she soared above the world, pulled along by their buoyancy like the house in “Up.” The view sure was nice from up there (although goodness, she couldn’t believe how many women were letting their roots go these days).
Egg choice was just one of the many things she was right about in life. Being right about everything felt great, like soaring above everyone else’s heads through the crisp elevated air. Yes, the oxygen was thinner up there, but she had acclimated to the lower O2 levels as quickly as she had succeeded in everything else she did. She didn’t even have to think about anything anymore; life was easy with everything decided upon. Some of her righteousness was handed down to her, but the rest she had picked up along the way, from her unbiased news station, her social group, her choice of political party. Laying in bed at night, she fell asleep easily – she wasn’t plagued like some by thoughts of self-doubt. A quick pat on the back and the white noise machine in the hall put her right to sleep.
Then, one day, a pinprick. It was all it took to start her descent down to the world below. It happened one day when the kids were hyper, poking at each other and tumbling wildly around the room. The blow from their chaos hit her hard – a sucker punch that threw her backwards, flailing, falling, out of control and unsure of which way was up. She crashed into the desk, overturning it as well as her own sense of purpose. The piles of papers and wads of cash – years of planning, organizing, and accumulating – failed to provide her with the cushion she needed to break her fall, and down she went to the sound of her back smacking against the hard floor.
After the neck brace came off, she lay on the chiropractor’s table for the third time, and suddently, it hit her. Paper made a terrible cushion. How had she not discerned that until now? It wasn’t like she hadn’t been told – that message had been gifted to her in a thousand different ways, but she had never honestly applied that lesson to their own way of living. She had stuffed their mattress with paper and she was sure her nights of good sleep depended on creature comforts like that one. Perhaps, she thought, just perhaps…could she have been under-analytical…or even worse, closed-minded? Definitely not wrong…that possibility didn’t apply to her. No, it couldn’t be…
When she got home, she scrambled for the scotch tape, but her frantic efforts failed – it wouldn’t stick to latex. The pinprick only grew larger with her attempts at mending it. Down, down she came. Down with the epiphany that she had been wrong – actually wrong – that a thing as simple, yet central, as paper could not provide her with true comfort or care.
Her black and white life was different after that bombshell. She didn’t consistently dwell in the right anymore, because she understood now what happened when black and white mixed. That black and white could mix. Conversations and the consumption of information were much harder; gone were the days of smiling and nodding politely when something challenged her, then patting herself on the back later as she changed out of her day clothes and washed her makeup down the sink.
What else was gray in the world? The process of considering, listening, the openness to being wrong was draining, yet exhilarating. The pinpricks continued, and she could see less of people’s hair problems and more of their faces. The helium seeped out slowly into the air around her and she descended, down, down, moving so slowly that it was almost imperceptible.
Until the moment her feet touched down and she again walked amongst her kind.
“All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm… Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people too.”
— John Green —