The Astonishing Color of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

a scent like the quiet grass at night.

And I would’ve had to explain that I was colorless, translucent. I was a jellyfish caught up in a tide, forced to go wherever the ocean willed. I was as unreal as my mother’s nonexistent note.

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

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.

“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.”

Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true.

Long before everything: She was already hurting.

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

If I don’t walk inside, maybe I can just stand out here with my suitcase and feel like she’s still there, waiting for me to go in so she can shout a greeting over the music without stopping her fingers. I can pretend that when she finishes the Rachmaninoff, she’ll swing her legs around the piano bench and leap up to give me a hug.

And in a few days, when it’s Sunday, I’ll roll out of bed and find her in the kitchen making waffles with berries and whipped cream. I’ll hear that sunny voice chirp “Good morning!” to me while I’m still shaking off the fog of sleep, and I’ll grunt back in response, remember to smile at her, offer to help mix the batter.

Bargaining with the Universe to make the things that happened miraculously reverse or go away. The magical thinking of loss... but also the muscle memory of loss. The repeated experiencing of it when your heart, soul and body are so used to the mundane things you do next to and with that person every day to walk into that room or expect that daily experience & then have to remember it, all over again.

I’ll do all the things I constantly forgot to, all the things I wish I could go back and add in like another ...

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

“It doesn’t have to be about winning anymore. Now it’s something different. Now you’re just doing this for yourself. You can’t chicken out.”

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.