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![In the beginning, the children who are most interesting are the ones who make cars out of cans and dolls out of knives. Later, children with afterschool lessons and social schedules surpass them because appointments prepare them to be interesting in a context. Much later, most parents couch their regrets in sighs and say they wish they had done more. They clarify that they wish they could have done more. Parents from elsewhere talk mainly about their own parents, tracking the gap. Others have more lateral complaints after reading books on plant cultivation and memorizing ideal temperatures, water sources, and angles of sunlight. Now that there is no reason to lie, or expect remuneration, everyone agrees it was not always love, in fact, usually it wasn’t, most days it was a hunger they all called love.](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-19-at-1.12.19 PM.png)
![People used to wake up feeling made of glass. From that morning on, they knew they had to avoid public spaces, human touch, and rotation-based movement. Sleeping and eating patterns adjusted considerably to accommodate the new conditions. Some starved, no longer needing food, and some inflated, wanting to fill the vase with color. Those who were standing when they realized had to learn to sleep standing, and those who were sitting could no longer stand, such a hinge being the thinnest glass. The fear of breakage was contagious, spreading within houses and then to neighborhoods. We have become less efficient, in the years since, in imagining our fragility and perceiving our suffering.](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-19-at-1.12.44 PM.png)
![Blue is the most popular color, primarily because it is most common and so many colorless objects can be perceived as blue: a fire’s core, the planet’s edges, our veins and other casings. There are many named modern blues, with some made proper nouns by universities, countries, and other corporations. Others are patented by individuals or companies, but rights to a color can only be enforced in a context: a jewelry blue, for example, only holds exclusivity power for jewels, and could legally be adapted as a paint color, just as a phone company’s trademarked brown could be used in unrelated ads for furniture, the same way the pink of the horizon is always also navy. Around the world, when the paintings we love are averaged, the scene becomes a pale and paler blue, while the foreground’s figures grow blurry, more general.](https://therumpus.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-19-at-1.13.18 PM.png)
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Author photograph courtesy of Cindy Juyoung Ok
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