Today, everything is brown.
The sky wears a coat of wet cardboard, creases folding softly into clouds.
Light filters through like old film; sepia, dust-kissed, like a memory sketched in condensation. 

The air smells like the earth after rain.
Not like the first splash, but the hush, the whisper of belonging between the soil and clouds.

The leaves? 
They no longer argue with the wind.
They curl up like pages half-read and left beside the bed.
You can almost hear them mumble old love poems to the pavement.

And the trees, they stand with their skin darkened, soaked in memory.
Patient listeners, who've spent the night collecting echoes from the wind,  storing them in rings, we'll never see. 

In the kitchen, tea sits still.
Draped in the colour of grandmother’s stories.
Steam rising slow, not eager to escape; like thoughts  that have nowhere else to be.

There’s a bowl of walnuts, little brown brains hiding secrets; dreaming of those high branches, they’ll never climb again.

A cinnamon stick leans in the corner jar, cracked but fragrant.
Its bark split like an old book's spine opened too often by hands reaching for comfort.

There’s a leather jacket slouched over a chair.
The kind that remembers every shoulder it held.
Its arms droop like tired hugs, and its pockets still hold ticket stubs from movies seen in another life. 

Time moves slowly today.
Like coffee cooling in a chipped mug, like rainwater running over a mud path, not rushing anywhere.
Just carving quiet paths, no one notices.

Some memories come in shades of brown.
Not black, not white, just right there.

Today is not grey.
It does not twinge like blue or sting like red.

It is brown.
And brown lingers.
It tiptoes through a house, settling in corners,  content to stay unseen and at the same time never truly gone. 

- Neha Sharma