Dirty Chai’s latest publication in the Nude Awakenings column comes to us from Ilana Masad, who was inspired to write “Grayscale” during her senior year of college after her “really kickass writing teacher” assigned the piece “We Were Our Age” by Dawn Raffel—a piece Ilana describes as being “all about language and emotion and allusion, a piece that you can’t classify as a story but can’t classify as anything else either.”

Says Ilana: “‘Grayscale’ is what happens when that teacher then tells you to try to write something where you pay attention to the way words sound and connect and allude. ‘Grayscale’ is what happens when you’re a clinically depressed and anxious writer and find yourself with a vehicle to tell a story that is about someone sad and angry and dreary and gray and tired.

“‘Grayscale’ is also something you look back and cringe at a little bit, but…