[Jestor]

Evening. The black velvet canopy patterned with white diamonds.

White. Black. Contrasts. Let us bring Red into the picture as well, for Red is frequently involved.

White.

The colour of purity and beauty. Yet also a hue of fragility, of sickness. Is it then the most beautiful and pure thing to be sick and frail instead of healthy and hale? Women of white hands, weak, yet loved for their loveliness.

Black.

Death and strength. Disease and contagion. Too much white eventually leads to the ebony? The flush of a minor affliction grown to a bloated and beastly corpse. Yet, there is a certain allure in its power and domination.

Red.

Passion and blood. Love and martyrdom. The most violent and unstable of these three, but also the most compelling. Indeed, it is those tales steeped in the ferocity of this shade that most affect us, most colour our dreams and shape our destinies.

See the world in black and white only and your road will be a rigid one. Life needs red (Is it any surprise that blood is red) to do more than exist as an automaton.

Colour your universe solely in red and black and your life shall be short, tragic, and full of melancholy and despair. Yet, many are those who names are legendary by way of knowing not the white. E.A. Poe, we salute you.

Do people who see only the white and the red exist past the age of, oh, say, twenty-one? These are the idealists, the dreamers who refuse to allow the banshee of black to diminish their land of enchantment. ...Yet it is they, by their very dismissal of that onyx rogue, who are most prone to disillusion when that raven marauder strikes too close to home... If they are not fortunate enough to die young and leave a legacy of light, they will eventually be overtaken by the pursuing avenger and be plunged into the drab world of black and white... the solitary, diametrically opposed colours made all the sharper in their contrast by virtue of Red's vanquished state.

Which of these am I? I must say that all three are in my life, though the portrait of my existence is largely done up in vehement crimson framed by the pathos of brooding obsidian. The aspects of white, you ask? Largely in the weakness of my body and the timidity of my personality.

Timid Tim. A fitting alliteration.

Bed summons me. Tomorrow, another game we play.