The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy

“Orchid, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I whispered to it. In real life, it didn’t say anything back. It just fluttered a little in the moonlight and the sea wind. But when I got around to dreaming, I dreamed about the orchid, and it said: a farm.

It’s my own little joke, even though the punchline is sadness. I think a joke like that is a present you make to yourself, so every time you say it, even if it hurts, you get a very cohesive feeling out of it, because the past you and the present you are talking to each other, and it’s nice to have friends.

I didn’t know what to say to him. You can only love and need and miss someone so much for years and years before language just washes its hands of the whole business. We used to be part of each other and now we were nothing, and nobody’s brain knows how to square that. So instead of saying those things I said: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

He stared at me hungrily, as if he were eating up the sight of me now so he could make it through the winter on this meal alone.

But you can’t ever imagine what you’re going to care about when you turn into the version of you that’s waiting on the other side of five years from now. That’s a stranger waiting to ambush you, and all you can do is plant your feet and try not to get thrown.

Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can’t anymore and be trash separately.

because I knew what it was really like when everyone knew your name and it had no gold in it, not even a sip.

And in my dream, if the fathers and mothers loved their sons and daughters and sang to them in their cradles, they made a good country, and if they didn’t, they made a tyranny, so whether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.”

WHEN A MAN asks you to run away with him, it is almost always because he is afraid of what will happen if you take too long to think him through.

But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it’s already done getting ruined all over you. Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler.

“Someday you’ll stop loving me this much,” I whispered to him in the heat of the moon. “I tried that already,” he whispered back.