The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

But I guess the universe has a way of knocking supposed-tos right on their asses.

“What color?” Axel said quietly. This is the question we always ask to figure out what the other person’s feeling. We’ve been best friends since Mrs. Donovan’s art class—long enough that that’s all we need. One color to describe a mood, a success, a failure, a wish.

Even in sleep I had been afraid to let go.

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.

The more I think about it, the more that believing seems like the ultimate definition of family. I guess my family is kind of broken. Always has been.

People see me as different.

“We’re not lost,” Axel said finally. “We’re just headed somewhere different.”

We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering.

Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again.

Here. Go ahead. Unspool, and let the memories go. Let them be gone.

only I had been raised more Taiwanese, and could somehow prove to these people that I belong here. This was my mother’s home for the first half of her life—can’t it feel a little bit like home to me, too?

Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point, we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger.

Was it my fault? I was the one who was around her the most. Was I somehow preventing her from getting better?

“It’s okay to be afraid. But not okay if be afraid means you do nothing. You must not do nothing. That’s not life worth living.”

Long before I lost my mother, my mother lost her sister. My mother lost her parents—or at least, that’s what she believed. Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true. Long before doctors put a label on her condition and offered slips of paper bearing the multisyllabic names of pharmaceuticals. Long before my father started leaving on his work trips.

Long before everything: She was already hurting.

Breathe them in. Let them settle in your lungs. Those are the colors of right now.

‘Once you figure out what matters, you’ll figure out how to be brave.’

Memories that tell a story, if you look hard enough. Because the purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.