It was the simplicity of it all that startled Ally.

Had it always been this way? Hues seamlessly blended together, descending in a smooth gradient, dimmest with abysmal depth overhead and brightest with shallow sight at the line where the sky ceased and the landscape began. She found it hard to believe that the dome of infinity that shielded the Earth from the vast, ruthless outer space keeping in stock innumerable threats and cosmic horrors took only a handful of shades to complete. If she could tear off a piece of the Greek sky to hold with her fingers, it’d look like a color code ticket that one used at a paint shop to find the right wall paint. They said that the color of the sky was but reflections of the ocean. That, Ally was convinced. There was no arguing with scientifically proven facts. But the truly impressive was the lack of even a speck of clouds or a stray blob wandering around that would’ve blemished the monochrome.

Had it always been this simple? It didn’t seem so when they last bade each other farewell. Ally thought it would be the easiest to call the shots, to let Eliza go. Letting a person drift away seemed wiser than keeping a soulless corpse alongside in bed, feeding off her energy while festering her flesh. But what she forgot was that they would come back, remnants of the person’s spirit, air, and warmth. They’d come back as ghosts, hiding around the turning of the stairwell, in their favorite bottle of wine, behind the bench at their frequented park, or in between each shut of her eyelids where they used to be visible and reachable. Eliza was unreachable now, and her haunting of Ally hadn’t stopped since. She thought parting ways would be the simplest of it all, but instead, she was dragged through a protracted journey of unspeakable torture during which her deeply ingrained habits of loving Eliza weakened her psyche and were out to get her at every corner. She couldn’t describe how clouded she had been feeling. It wasn’t that simple. Not at all.

But as Ally laid down gently on her back onto the soft bed made of piercing blue seawater, under which her limbs, ears, and half of her face submerged, she stared into the simple, monochrome Aegean sky. She wondered to herself:

Could it have been that simple though?