She hated that white wall with a vengeance.

It seemed innocuous enough at first — after all, what harm can a wall do to you? — but given enough time and prolonged exposure, even the smallest things can drive a person mad.

There was nothing wrong with the colour white; she actually quite liked the colour, in fact — but sometimes it was just a bit too much white.

She hated that it was an entire floor-to-ceiling, evenly spread out hue of HEX #FFFFFF, or in RGB (255, 255, 255); a brilliant, bright, almost blinding shade that made it hard to look at for long periods. And yet she had to face it every single day.

Couldn’t it have been a more interesting shade of white, she often thought to herself. Something like an eggshell or a creamy vanilla; she’d even have settled for something greyish like the colour of oatmeal, but no, she had no say in the matter.

Yet it never seemed to bother all the other dullards that she had to share the space with, those moronic idiots who carried on about in their mundane, day-to-day tasks oblivious to the fact that she was being tortured by this great, white, perfect monstrosity hiding in plain sight.

Because nothing was supposed to be so clean and minimalistic and flawless. Chaos should be the default for everything in life and it just never hits people that aesthetic perfection is just so fucking unnatural.

She blamed the modernist movement, spearheaded by Adolf Loos and a pathetic group of self-proclaimed geniuses who preached ornament as crime, removing anything they deemed unnecessary for form and function and with it, removing any semblance of personality as well.

All the while, the wall was taunting her, whispering her name, begging her to try and destroy its perfectly distributed saturation. Until she could finally take it no longer.

She rammed her head against the wall, trying to make a mark on this oversized canvas. The first hit left her kind of dizzy and it obviously hurt, but a few more bashes and the adrenaline that kicked in made it so that she couldn’t even feel the blood that was gushing from her forehead.

The wall was white no longer — with splashes of blooming red bursting like fireworks all over, dashes of colour that broke through the mundanity that was her reality.

She took a moment to admire her masterpiece, a still-dripping abstract painting of blood on white plaster, and then fell unconscious in the satisfaction that her work was complete.

“Oh my goodness!” screamed the orderly on duty when checking in. “We need an ambulance in here quick! Inmate 2650 has had another psychotic breakdown…”