The Astonishing Colour of After

by Emily X.R. Pan

I thought of the hard cover of a book smacking shut on a story that wasn’t finished.

figure out what exactly it means to grieve for a mother.

Someone needs to make it illegal for parents to throw things you once said back in your face.

We raced toward the edge of the sky—we could see the crease where it touched our part of the earth—but we never made it. The horizon always ran ahead of us.

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

It’s a strange juxtaposition: the city so tightly packed, everything built so closely together—and beyond that, the sprawling greens and blues of lush forests.

When I was little, I used to ask how they met, and they would just say they’d known each other since the beginning of time, for hundreds of lives.”

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?

Only once a year do they eat like people who deserve to survive.

I lost a world the other day. Has anybody found? You’ll know it by the row of stars Around its forehead bound.

Why did it feel like our family was crumbling if we were still full of so much love?

Here, in two dimensions, 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?

“Do you think people can be in love but also unhappy?” “Yes,” said Axel, the most solid answer he’d given in a long time. “Definitely.”

Every day we went out to “be with nature and make art”—I focused on the art of screaming silently.

“Go study your music. Go be inspired. The summer will disappear, and soon you’ll be home again.”

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

The cat was the one who reminded her that life was a real thing. All the rest of us might as well have been mannequins on display in the window of a museum.

“She’s forgotten how to be happy,” I told him.

And more lights are out over the water, their reflections twinkling faintly. Proof this little world is still wide awake.

The clouds you see at night hold promises.

Love. And what do any of us really know about that?

That’s me. Little Leigh, daughter of Dory and Brian, back when all three of us were still in love with one another, before things had gone horribly wrong.

We kissed, and I was every color in the world, alight.

It was like music was where she was born, and when she played the piano, she was home again.”

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

The wind rises up to claim the gray. And then it’s gone. We’re left with the colors of after. The colors of now.

There’s still a mother-shaped hole inside me. It’ll always be there. But maybe it doesn’t have to be a deep, dark pit, waiting for me to trip and fall.