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Orquídea’s favorite color was the blue of twilight—just light enough that the sky no longer appeared black, but before pinks and purples bled into it. She thought that color captured the moment the world held its breath, and she’d been holding hers for a long time.
People think they know about misfortune and bad luck. But there was being unlucky—like when you tripped over your shoelaces or dropped a five-dollar bill in the subway or ran into your ex when you were wearing three-day-old sweatpants—then there was the kind of bad luck that Orquídea had. Bad luck woven into the birthmarks that dotted her shoulders and chest like constellations. Bad luck that felt like the petty vengeance of a long-forgotten god.
It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard.
Suddenly, she was too pretty, too ugly, too smart, too dim, too short, too quiet, too loud, too—everything, and not enough at the same time.
He returned to the docks, and that was when Orquídea learned that she was exactly like her father, untethered, belonging to nowhere and nothing and no one, like a ship lost to the seas.
Orquídea didn’t like it because she knew she wasn’t a flower, delicate and pretty and waiting to be plucked. For what? To be smelled? To sit in a glass of water until she withered? She was more than that. She wanted to be rooted so deep into the earth that nothing, no human, no force of nature, save an act of the heavens themselves, could rip her out.
It was a funny thing that people warned of the dangers of pretty women, that there was power in beauty. But Orquídea thought beautiful men were even more dangerous. Men were already born with power. Why did they need more?
“Protect your heart from brittle things.”
You could be born into a family, but you still had to choose them.
“We’re millennials. We’re desensitized and have no shame.”
Some people were meant for great, lasting legacies. Others were meant for small moments of goodness, tiny but that rippled and grew in big, wide waves.
“You have to focus all of your energy on that connection every family has. It’s in our bones, our blood. More than that, it’s in the questions we need answered. The secrets, traumas, and legacies that we don’t know we’ve inherited, even if we don’t want them.”
How do you fight a thing that believes it owns you? How do you fight the past? With gold leaves and salt? With silence? With new earth beneath your feet? With the bodies, the hearts of others? With hearts that are tender and bloodied but have thorns of their own. With the family that chooses you.
But that was the way of missing people. You wished for them, you longed for them, you forgot them. Then you wished for them again.
