Green

A cold gust of wind pushed against his back, as if an invisible hand were gently but firmly urging him forward. He stepped onto the street. The crosswalk stripes, still damp from the last rain, gleamed under the streetlights. Their color seemed foreign, as if they had fallen from another world onto the gray asphalt.

Yellow

A strange yellow for crosswalk stripes. Not the vibrant yellow of lemons or marsh marigolds, but a dull, almost melancholic yellow. A yellow that smelled of forgetting. Like the last smear of mustard on a plate after a lonely dinner. Or the pale yellow of an old paper lantern whose light barely reached the ground anymore, as if it had long since stopped expecting anything.

With every step, the street beneath his feet grew softer, as if someone had altered the consistency of reality. People, it is said, have four basic needs: orientation and control, pleasure-seeking and pain avoidance, attachment, and self-worth enhancement and protection. Like analog mechanical clocks, they are built into us, ticking ceaselessly, driving us forward, making us choose - or avoid choices.

But now, nothing ticked.

Only when his body began to feel strangely weightless and sluggish at the same time, as if he were walking through water, did he truly notice it. The cars had vanished. The city sounds had fallen silent. No wind, no voices, no fixed points for his gaze to anchor onto. He kept walking - but in which direction?

Up, down, left, right - it no longer mattered. The world had slipped from its hinges. He tried to orient himself, to grasp something that could give him direction. But there was nothing except the yellow lines.

A quiet, unpleasant feeling began to spread in his chest. A feeling one only notices when it’s too late. Disorientation. Loss of control. A strange, invisible weight pressed on his shoulders, as if someone had placed him in a room without doors or windows and commanded him to find an exit. He had to get out of here.

He stopped. Closed his eyes. Waited. Maybe the world would reorder itself on its own.

He opened his eyes.

He stood in an endless sea of yellow lines, branching out in the distance and disappearing somewhere into the fog. They seemed aimless, as if they had once been part of a greater order but had since drifted off without purpose into the void.

The air smelled of nothing. Not of rain, not of dust, not of metal or asphalt. Since when did air smell like nothing? He inhaled deeply, searching for any kind of clue, but there was only silence.

Silence? No, not quite. A faint humming vibrated in the distance. Muffled, flickering, like an old radio station just slightly off the correct frequency. He moved toward it, following the yellow line. But with each step, the sound receded. Or was it the fog growing denser? He didn’t know. All he knew was that the world continued to dissolve. The fog was now so thick that it condensed on his skin, ran in fine droplets over his forehead, as if he had submerged into something that was neither entirely water nor entirely air.

He stopped. Listened. The humming was still there, but whether it was coming closer or drifting further away, he couldn't tell. Maybe it had never really been there.

His hand wandered into his coat pocket, as if needing reassurance that he was still real. His fingers found a crumpled piece of fabric. He pulled it out.

A sock?

Red

A car horn yanked him out of his daze. The city was back. The cold wind brushed against his face, as if reassuring him that everything was still just as before. But something had changed. He was still standing in the middle of the street. The sock in his hand. He stared at it for a while, slowly turning it between his fingers. Where had it come from? He didn’t know. How long had it been in his coat pocket? Or had someone placed it there - unnoticed, deliberately, like a message without words?

Another horn blast.

He looked up. The driver was staring at him, impatiently, with an expression somewhere between annoyance and indifference. Probably in a hurry. Probably always in a hurry.

Hurriedly, he moved, crossing the street. Traffic resumed its flow, as if nothing had happened. The world rearranged itself, slipping back into its usual rhythm. The city swallowed him up again, without asking questions.

He slowly placed the sock back into his coat pocket, as if it were an insignificant object.

Which, of course, it was.

He kept walking and thought:

I should probably do some laundry.