The Difference Between Orange and Yellow

When I was a little girl, my mother remembers me telling her and Dad that I was never going to get married. I was going to live with them forever.

When you are young, simple things seemed to be the most difficult: Clipping your nails, slipping that hook over the button of your bibs, even putting eye drops in were mountain-movers. They were skills that, at the time, you thought you would never be able to do yourself.

Likewise, when the simple acts seem so impossible, it is the big decisions that come easy when you were young because being young made honesty come easy. You knew the difference between right and wrong, good and bad like you knew the difference between orange and yellow. You weren’t afraid to call people out: “You are orange. You are yellow.” For when you are young, you are honest with yourself first—everyone else came later.

Though I can clip my nails myself, and I have learned the trick of placing eyes drops in (You have to squeeze it in the corner of your eye and then tilt you head, so that it seeps in as though a tear receding back into your eye.) I find that I still need my parents, for their kind of love is honest; it is orange. They put you first.

Some days when I wake up, I think about what would have happened if I had listened to that little girl, but I find that I am no longer in the bottom bunk sleeping below my sister.

I have to be honest with myself. I have to know what is yellow, and what is orange.