The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

How is there so much that I still don’t know about my own family?

If only I could rewind, go back in time and ask my mother every question about every tiny thing. How crucial those little fragments are now; how great their absence. I should have saved them up, gathered them like drops of water in a desert. I’d always counted on having an oasis.

Wow 😪

But why is their logo a red bird? “The bird is a new

logo,”

She doesn’t realize that the ghost is already with us.

“Do we keep this one?”

This is my grandmother.

two little girls side by side, peering straight into the camera, unsmiling.

They understood each other. They were each other’s true family.

She hates Emily Dickinson.

He didn’t pick up.

they looked so happy. But then, didn’t everyone, in pictures? That was almost the point, wasn’t it? To be able to look back and see yourself smiling, even if the camera had shuttered and clicked while you were standing there thinking about all the things that were wrong?

another girl,

Some terrible requirement of being a teenager is being absolutely awful when your parents are being lovely.

“An aneurysm,

And what do they think of me, then, the product of their daughter and a white man?

How did my parents think they could build a family around so many secrets? It’s like setting a house on top of a network of ditches and loose ground, and praying the foundation holds. No wonder we fell apart.

Those are the colors of right now.

Sobbing...

There’s still a mother-shaped