Stories • Quite Short • Love KNows, Love Grows
A Love of Many Colors
Written by zelmazemra from her own experience and sent from the planet khoyyohk.
This short story was included in the Oraean collection about discoveries of love titled Love Knows, Love Grows,
for the roots of the story’s heart leads to that famous multi-colored forest of Oraea called Esmarailiah.
It wasn't until we were nearly finished redoing our home that we found the envelope.
Faintly yellowed from long age, made of a thick yet velvet-soft kind of paper strange to our touch, it was a mystery to the most of us. But that's because its story wasn't ours. Siblings, grandparents, cousins, we all passed the envelope around, asking who knew what it was or what to do -
Until it reached the hands of our mother.
Hands frozen in a kind of shock.
A face shaped in some kind of… disbelief?
Just about everything else was gone, dispersed to family and community. Our father's space suits, his books and his baking gear, his clothes and his canoe, his collection of asteroid fragments and his great constellation maps. Soon even the home would be in someone else's hands, and our mother would live at the heart of our clan for as long as she liked.
But at this moment, this strange envelope and all its hidden history were in our mother's hands. She looked nowhere but the envelope as she opened it.
Tree leaves and colored pieces of paper fell from it into her open hand, and with a small cry she sank to sitting.
The rest of us couldn't help but draw close as she felt her way through these leaves and papers of all shapes and colors, all with the same swooping handwriting across every bit of them, crammed in at odd angles in a rowdy way to fill them with language. She read pieces here and there as she twisted them all this way and that, laughing and sobbing and gasping and cooing in a free-flowing overwhelm that began to move and ripple through the rest of us. Tears appeared everywhere as she at last looked up, eyes all a-wonder.
"The summer I've told you of, where your father and I journeyed to Oraea and lived together for the first time, where we lived in the forest of Esmariliah and he wrote me letters every day about everything? About dreams and hopes and memories, and his heart, and the cosmos, and connections and us and all of you and leaves and loaves and all? The letters that made me love him for his love? That made me want to live with him in this life, and any other, from the dawning to the winking out of Time?"
She waved the papers, speechless.
These scraps, made from the many-colored trees of another planet, cut and composed a lifetime ago, as alive now as they had ever been -
and maybe, for this moment, even more so.
And we all watched as her grief melted out of her, and she grew in love with him all over again.
