The Past Is Red

by Catherynne M. Valente

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 picked through the deflated soccer balls and broken lacrosse sticks and ghostly hanging nets of Sportington Gap, the cairns of ice skates, black pucks, tennis rackets, billiard balls like jawbreaker candy, the baffling novelty devices with AS SEEN ON TV stamped on their handles, and rusting free weights that once kept some drowned Fuckwit thin and strong in the face of their constant fucking smorgasbord of a life.

The only thing I want back from the Fuckwit world is this. This thing that has its grave in Winditch under the dead, burnt-out Home of the Tigers jumbotron. I want to have that much left over. I want to have enough left over that it matters to me who has the best smile at the volleyball tournament.

I walk through my memories like a house I’ve spent a life keeping neat and smart.

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.

St. Oscar says SCRAM to all that. Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can’t anymore and be trash separately.

Not many Fuckwit animals made their way onto the Misery Boats and thus to the Garbagetown patch after the floods. When you think about it, cows are practically made for drowning. But cats are practically made for sneaking onto people’s property and convincing them not to mind, and also to breed like they’ve got money on the outcome, so this that and the other, Garbagetown is just crawling with cats.

“I will tell you what I think. I think kings happen because some people have an empty place inside them that wants to be full and it will do anything to feel full and the first thing that makes it feel the opposite of empty it will chase forever and ever. And the weirdest thing about this place is that obeying fills it up, but making someone else obey makes it slosh up and splash all over the floor.”

She listens, and I wish I could give her a little gold trophy for it, but I can’t, because of all the things Fuckwits gave trophies for, they never thought listening like nothing exists but time and words was half as important as losing a volleyball tournament.

Being alive is like being a very bad time traveler. One second per second, and yet somehow you still get where you’re going too late, or too early, and the planet isn’t where it should be because you forgot to calculate for that even though it was extremely important and you left notes by the door to remind yourself, and the butterfly you stepped on when you were eight became a hurricane of everything you ever lost in your forties, and whatever wisdom you tried to pack with you has always gotten lost in transit, arriving, covered in festive stickers, a hundred years after you died.

Lives have apocalypses, too. You just can’t know when you’re in it until the water is already closing over your head and all you can hear are volcanoes, one after the other, detonating the possibility of the future you imagined.

The oceans can erase our cities, but they cannot drown our existential malaise. That shit’s waterproof.