Colorblind

by Siera Maley

But I had a simple solution to this moral dilemma: to ignore it in hopes that it’d eventually go away.

Knowing when they’d die made it inconvenient to get invested, to say the least, and if there was one thing I’d learned, it was that sometimes you have to let people make their own decisions.

It was a little too morbid for me, but I humored him. It was his way of trying to turn those very real people with very real ages of death into characters. The goal was to trick ourselves into caring less.

“Do you ever wonder why we all try so hard to live to age 80?” I asked Robbie abruptly. “What’s the point? You go to school, then you live to work and work to live until you retire, and then you die, either painfully or not. And that’s if you’re lucky. It all seems so pointless sometimes.” “Hell if I know. They have an entire industry dedicated to making sure people don’t feel pessimistic enough to ask the questions you’re asking now.” “Psychiatry?” I asked. “Religion,” he corrected with a smirk,

Religion basically comes down to ‘Please don’t all off yourselves; we promise you’ll get rewarded for dying unwillingly instead as long as you aren’t a murderer. Or a homosexual.’”

It was no wonder Robbie was an Atheist; the idea that something intelligent enough to design thinking, feeling, living creatures would then assign them unchangeable expiration dates was horrifying.

It’d be nice to have some evidence that we control our own destinies, I think.

There was something about her that made me comfortable in a way I wasn’t used to feeling. I’d heard before that sometimes two people could meet and instantly click: instantly know they’re going to get along. It was like that with her.

I didn’t want to befriend a cute girl months from death. That sounded like a tragic Nicholas Sparks novel waiting to happen…. but only if she somehow found me attractive.

I tried my best to forget about Chloe, because if I thought about her too much, I’d wind up dwelling on the fact that she was a real person with a real life who had real parents that were going to be devastated when she really died.

Life would go on with or without Chloe Stephens, after all. It waited for no one. It never had.

Loss is… it’s hard. But that’s no reason to cut yourself off from the rest of the world just because you’re scared to lose someone again.”

“Harper, people are not milk cartons,” Dad sighed out. “You don’t pick and choose the ones you think will last the longest without going sour. If it feels right, you just go with it until it doesn’t feel right anymore. And sometimes when something goes wrong, it hurts. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it in the first place.”

She was really set on spending time with me, which either meant that she was desperate to make a friend… or something more. I didn’t have much of an ego, so I assumed the former, but both options were still terrifying.

“She could be a serial killer. Or the bait for a serial killer.” “Then I will miss you dearly. Goodbye, Harper.”

I saw what I’d missed when I’d first taken in her appearance at my front door: a thin handmade bracelet encircled her wrist, repeatedly bearing, in order, the six colors of the rainbow.

Maybe it was the same omniscient power that had given Chloe her number. Maybe, just like there wasn’t a way to stop the numbers, there also wasn’t a way for me to come to my senses and leave Chloe alone. At least, if there was… I’d spend months struggling to find it.

Love was Robert Walker as soldier Joe Allen running after Judy Garland’s bus, calling out to her to meet him under a clock tower, or it was Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer swaying together in the moonlight, or Claudette Colbert tearfully telling Clark Gable that she couldn’t live without him. It was foreign: unattainable. I mean, I couldn’t really even let myself get close enough to a girl to start to like her as a person, let alone as a friend or anything more. Chloe shattered that image with a smile and a laugh, and after just a day together, I was wondering why I’d chosen now to let my guard down.

When I watched romances or read stories, I inserted myself into the main character’s dilemma. I was the piner: the one loving someone and waiting for them to love me back. But this was real life. And in real life, I was the love interest.

before I could stop myself, I declared, “You’re gay.” The crunching stopped. There was a short pause. And then, “Was that a question?” “I’m sorry.” “For… pointing out the obvious?” “I don’t think it was obvious,” I half-lied. “Sure it was. I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco, and I wore a rainbow bracelet the other day.” “The true reason you moved here comes out,” I joked, trying to ease some of the tension. She ran with it, mercifully.

This is the present for us, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a present in the future. And in that future present, this is the past. The past can’t change, so everything’s already set in stone. Fate knows the future, so Fate knows its past, which is our present.” “That makes no sense, you pretentious idiot,” I groaned out. He put out his cigarette and shrugged his shoulders.

we haven’t seen a number change, so I’m automatically more right than you are.” “Well, I hope that makes you feel better,” I bit out. “Not at all. It makes me feel like shit, actually.”

When Robbie saw Chloe, her number would no longer be a message for my eyes only. It’d be a lot like how coming out had been. Sharing it with other people; saying it aloud… that made it exist in a world outside of my mind. That made it real.

Robbie nudged me and, sounding far too empathetic, murmured, “She’s not even trying to hide that she likes you.” I felt my heart twist in my chest and tried my best to forget what he’d said as I moved to climb back into my car.

Chloe didn’t know anyone in San Francisco. She had no friends. And she didn’t deserve to die feeling alone in a new city. I couldn’t fall in love with her, I knew, but trying to help her was the only real option I had. I couldn’t just ignore her now, and if I couldn’t keep her alive, I could at least be there for her when she died. The last months of her life being happy ones were more important than anything I’d go through while helping make them happy. That was the right thing to do, even if it would be hard.

“Yeah, I am. And also gay.” She furrowed her eyebrows, caught between looking thoughtful and inquisitive. “Well, now I’m confused. You didn’t kiss me.” I arched an eyebrow. “Nice ego.” She flushed abruptly as her own words sank in. “I didn’t… I mean… That came out wrong.” “I think it kinda came out how you meant it,” I corrected, shooting her a sympathetic look and a smile. “Okay. Maybe it did. I’m passably attractive and aware of it; sue me.”

Where are we going? You should just tell me.” “To one of my favorite places in San Francisco,” was all I said. “Is it a gay bar? I hope it’s not. I don’t want to meet other girls.” “I’m flattered,” I joked and ignored the way my stomach flopped. “I have this theory,” Chloe began. “You have a lot of theories.” She ignored me and continued, “-that if I hit on you relentlessly enough, you’ll crack eventually. See, when guys do it, it’s creepy and gross, but I’m female and adorable and you actually like hanging out with me, so it’s okay.”

“Okay.” I pointed to the woods nearby. “We’re following that trail there for only about half a mile or so. My dad told me about this place a few years back. He and mom went here in high school on their first date.” “Are you serious? And you try to act like you don’t like me,” Chloe marveled, her mouth wide open.

“I thought San Francisco was going to be this constant gay pride parade,” she told me abruptly. “Like, hot lesbians everywhere. I’ve gotta say… this is better.” “A seventeen-year-old socially awkward virgin with a job at a fast food place. And I’m refusing to date you. You sure hit the jackpot,” I joked.

“What do you even watch?” “I like older movies,” I explained. “Casablanca, The Sound of Music-” “You’re so deep!” she sighed out, pretending to swoon. “Oh, come on. Like, what’s so great about Rocky IV?” “Sylvester Stallone punches shit!” “You’re such a dude.” “Well, the actors in your movies were probably all bigots. So there.” “Because Sylvester Stallone is such a paragon of love and acceptance. Whatever. Julie Andrews is a gift.”

I was only half-listening to her. My gaze drifted down to where our hands were nearly touching, and I shifted mine to bring it closer to hers. Heart thudding hard in my chest, I reached out with my pinky to brush it up against hers. She reacted by pushing hers back against mine and then linking our pinkies together, and I heard her swallow another handful of popcorn.

“No. I used to get nervous. Then one day I decided that was stupid. So now, whenever I start to hesitate, I just tell myself to not worry about the consequences, push past the nerves, and do whatever it was I almost didn’t.” “That seems like a good way to make a lot of mistakes,” I pointed out. “Life’s all about mistakes. And it’s way too short to just wait around instead of cutting through the bullshit.”

“Is that what this is? The bullshit?” I wasn’t angry, and took care not to sound that way. I just genuinely wanted to get inside her head. “Of course not. This is… me spending a summer with a pretty girl, who, if she were to decide she maybe did actually wanna act on her urge to kiss me, would be welcome to do so.” “You’re waiting,” I restated for her. “You just said life’s too short to wait around.” “I make exceptions.”

I watched her, unmoving, and swallowed hard. She’d stopped biting her lip and was smiling at me now, and I marveled at the fact that a girl like her could ever be interested in a girl like me. She lit up rooms when she walked into them, and I was the epitome of the shy, antisocial kid that sat alone in corners at parties. Yet here we were, her with her hand on my neck as she shifted ever so slightly closer.

Have you ever considered the fact that maybe the goal of life isn’t to get through it as painlessly as possible?”

He studied me for a moment. The cigarette between his fingers slipped through them and fell to the ground, where he squashed it with his foot. “I’m a pretty cynical person. Even more cynical than you, which is saying something. So as much as I’m sure you don’t want to hear it, here’s the truth. All of this isn’t going to end well. You fucked up pretty badly by putting yourself in the position you’re in. If you hook up with her and she dies, you’ll be miserable.” He paused, digging the heel of his shoe into the gravel beneath us. “With that said… If you don’t hook up with her and she dies, you’ll be miserable and you’ll regret it.”

“It’ll be fun. We’re can spend most of the day at the park, and then we’ll be so exhausted we’ll pass out before it even sinks in that we’re sleeping in a tent. Oh, but before that we can make s’mores!” “Chocolate allergy,” I reminded her, and she groaned even as the words left my lips. “How do you live?” “Like Voldemort. A half-life. A cursed life.”

Robbie and I’d had countless conversations about staying detached from people outside of our families, and yet here we were, attached to each other. But at least I knew Robbie was going to be around for a while.

“This is beautiful,” she murmured, awestruck. “Isn’t it?” Still staring at her, I had to work hard to avoid agreeing with her in the cheesiest, most cliché manner ever recorded by modern humanity. But 2000-era romance movies suddenly seemed less contrived and annoying.

It occurred to me, then, as I sat on my bed, that maybe Dad saw some of the same things in Deborah that I saw in Chloe.

“We’re strong people, Harper. This won’t be fun, but we’ve been here before with people who were family. We can get through it again. And this time, we can stop being in denial and stop making lists and taking extra precautions that won’t change anything. This time we can help someone use the days they have left the way they should be used. In a way that doesn’t waste them. And I know that it’s morbid, and that it’ll be hard, but-” “But if we were Chloe, we’d want it this way,” I finished for him. “I know. I can do it.”

“We should make sleeping side by side our thing,” she told me, her voice muffled by her sleeping bag. “Like, forever.” “I think they call that marriage,” I laughed, my voice a whisper. “I’m okay with that,” she mumbled sleepily. Her eyes fluttered shut, and I brushed my thumb back and forth along her cheek, just watching her.

just want to be happy. Ignoring things makes me happy. Ignorance is bliss, right?”

Did you know that one of the biggest regrets dying people have is that they let other people dictate how they lived their lives?”

You could kiss me now,” I finally murmured. “I’m not the one scared to love someone,” she said. “I can wait.” She shifted closer to me, then, but didn’t kiss me. Instead, she nestled into me, her front pressed into my side and her face tucked between my shoulder and neck. Her arm slid over my stomach and her right hand found my left as it rested limply at my side. She interlocked our fingers and squeezed my hand, and my gaze flickered up to the stars overhead. I was sure, then, with Chloe relaxing beside me and her lips pressed gently against the skin by my collarbone, that if there somehow were a Heaven up there, she’d fit right in.

“I, like, am really into you,” she told me. I nodded along, processing her words more slowly than usual. “Like, not even just in a kissing and sex kind of way… I mean, totally that way, but sometimes it’s like… if I could just, like, press up super close to you and just kind of merge and be this hybrid person I still don’t think I’d be as close as I wanna be. And sometimes, like camping day, you’ll admit you feel the same way, but I hate how things can never just be easy. We met and we got along great and you like girls and I was like, this is gonna go so well, this is everything I wanted, and you really are. I just wanna be happy and I don’t want you to be unhappy, so if I make you happy then why can’t we just be happy, you know?”

“You can’t be afraid to lose everyone because then you’ll have no one, okay?” She reached out and squeezed my hand. “And if you have no one, then, like, you’ve lost everyone anyway.” She pressed her lips together and furrowed her eyebrows. “You know, life kinda sucks, doesn’t it? I think I see your point.”

But if I kissed Chloe, it’d mean more to me than just hooking up with some cute girl. I was beginning to wonder how I could ever live my life happily after losing her. She’d become my best friend.

For a moment, I forgot about the heartache that came with loving Chloe, and when it finally did begin to come creeping back into the recesses of my mind later that night, when I was alone in my bed, I ignored it. Some things were worth aching for.

I glanced up at her forehead, felt myself fall apart all over again at the sight of the sixteen that still rested there, and then looked back down into her eyes. It was the first part of her I’d ever seen, and I wanted it to be the last, too, if this was the end for us.