#thdylan

It’s a self-sabotaging doctrine, undebatably, especially so when it’s held beneath the scrutinizing light flickering in his mind. There’s got to be a nuance to meaningfulness for it to be a usable discipline, he realizes. Because there can be no proverbial silver lining threading the dark cloud of ominous portent that swirls into his mother’s scowl. He has to take it for what it is. Nothing good to come when her jaw is rigged like that, grimacing, laden with its unclarified purpose, dispelled by the silence she ultimately decides upon which, always, felt objectively worse. He thinks he prefers her condemnation to that, prefers something in place of nothing, knowing instead of not knowing. 

There’s always this look he gives his father. The kind that speaks for him without speaking. The one he reciprocates, deploys tactfully, emulating perfectly the trustable silence. Though he provides no discernible answer, the solace is palpable. It’s what matters, the consolation afterward. The meaningfulness of everything is what you can take away from it when you’re done. That’s why he’d push with his mother if he were more courageous, daring she’d express it, whatever it was. That’s why the smiles he feels with his father were genuine and not compensatory. He’s siphoning his happiness from him. He feels better.

Everything having to be meaningful is his own ignorant, oblivious coping mechanism. The unsaturated reality, the as-is, what he avoids, it’s a place where he wants it all to matter because the things that seem to have an identifiable purpose usually coincide with tragedy. In his mind, the color of happiness and the color of pain are distinct, with the latter so much clearer than the former he’d begun to wonder how either tint existed even oppositely because it was never a fair comparison between them. 

Pink and red. 

Pink is a flower. Red is the blood. Pink is so linear he can’t think of any other representation. Red is the warning. Pink is so stagnant he’s thinking of the flower again, and when he thinks of the flower again, he thinks of fragility instead because flowers are crushable entities and he wants to avoid repetition. Flowers are the most obviously death-susceptible. They die the most blatantly. Need help all their lives to exist, and then die. Not unlike everything else on the planet. Yeah, but it’s more undeniable with them. No sunlight? They die. No water? They die. There’s more layers with a person. One person can go a whole week with no sustenance. One person can forage all their necessities for themselves. What’s a flower doing but sitting and waiting and wilting?

Pink really is another word for happiness. 

Just as reliant, with a meaningfulness that’s just as nuanced, needs just as much cultivation as its flora. Pink is hard work but he’s committed, will gladly create these incalculable labyrinths of spiraling thought and contradictory dogma if that’s what it takes to stay in its midst. He’s basking in its essence right now, even. His smile is real, the resplendence behind his eyes, stepping cadence cheerful even, moving with such a bliss it doesn’t feel as detrimental as it should when he’s collided with her, Bae Yoona. Her. It doesn’t feel frightening, or it does, but not as much as it should, because he’s seeing her in that same pink tincture. Pink says she’s the senior in his arts class. The name beneath the canvas of that unfinished piece he’s been admiring for the last month. In it, he thinks he’s seeing an emerald field. Fields have flowers. 

Everything has to be meaningful.

“Hey!” It’s more a celebration than an outburst, joyfully at his knees as he reassembles the tonnage of her books into something carriable again, stacked neatly atop each other. “Hi hi! I know you. I mean, everyone knows you, right? Who wouldn’t? I’m not stupid,” laughing shyly, one hand freeing itself from beneath the weight of those tomes to rub over his nape. “But I mean, from the art club. I know you from the art club. Did you know that? I saw what you’ve been painting. Not to sound invasive, but if I do, sorry, but I’ve been watching you. Watching your painting, too. It’s like a child, you know? You helped it grow so quickly! So it must make you happy. Happiness needs help in order to flourish.” He nods and then he pauses, his words progressing tentatively, his curiosity still unabashed though.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, is it a flower that you’re painting? I thought it was a flower because I can see so much green. When I think of green, I think of springtime. Well, not all the time, actually. Sometimes I just think of the forest. And forests aren’t always the same as spring, you know? But, actually,” he drifts amidst a thoughtfulness, head tilted inquiringly. “Actually, when I think of springtime, I think of a forest. I think of a clearing and then I think of a forest behind it. In the belly of that clearing, there’s a lot of flowers. Is that what you’re painting?” His eyes stretch wide questioningly, somehow imploringly, smile persisting as he watches her almost loyally, impossibly shyer with the scatter of another kind of pink. A warm one, hot like blush, coloring him coyly, as he retracts behind the wake of his own revelation.

“Sorry, that’s kind of presumptuous, isn’t it? But is it something similar to that, though? Maybe? It doesn’t have to be, actually. I’d still think the same regardless: That it’s very pretty, very detailed and that you’re very talented. I’ve never really tried painting something like that before.”