The world is just a black and white, paint-by-number set. And we are just children holding plastic paintbrushes with unearned confidence.

The paint pallet holds every possible variant of living color, but only in my mind.

I decide, as I dip the bristles into pigment, whether to fill you in with a peaceful, friendly blue, a shiny happy gold, or a frightening stormy gray.

You, out there in the world, neutral and colorless, are flat and simply woven of repeated threads of thought.

I am the one who makes you special. I am the one who decides just how pretty or viciously ugly you will be to behold.

The world is made of inanimate pencil figures moving randomly across an eggshell canvas.

Only my color-filled mind can provide the substance of my own perceptions. I alone choose all the paints that color my own world.