the ceiling above me is an egg shell white.
i know this because i painted it.

at night,
thanks to the glow of my twenty-first-century typewriter,
it is gray.

but not the ghastly gray of a winter's sky––
not the reminding gray of an old man's hair––
the gray of charcoal from a pencil that writes too faintly.
faint enough that you squint to force it out against the pure white behind it and the blue line below it.
and when it appears to you, formed and shaped and sounded out,
it tells you everything you needed to hear.