orange (you're never going to read this)

[pomegranitemilk]

1. i was trying to write something happy. something lighthearted. and warm. and bright. i was trying to write something orange.

2. the color of goldfish when you’re five. the color of honey and tangerine tears. the color of the sky before a downpour when you have no umbrella. the color of the pill bottles beneath my sink. the color of you and me.

3. two months into it and i’ve only learned that i don’t know enough about what it means to be happy and lighthearted and warm and bright. i don’t know enough to write an entire story about it.

4. but i do know orange

5. i think i’ve spent my entire life trying to love it more. it’s such a hard color to love. i would’ve told you about it, how i thought it was the saddest color before we met, how it is and isn’t at all. i would’ve told you.

6. i didn’t keep anything from you. maybe apart from this.

7. orange—i think it’s the last color i’ll see before i die.

8. to be honest, i don't think you were ever really interested in anything i had to say. at least, that's how it felt. i think the one time i had your attention was when i was crying and that's the one time i didn’t want it. you only cared when i talked about you. i think you only liked the way you looked through my eyes. and that breaks my heart because i really thought i loved you. and i thought i was in love. i guess it makes sense why you told me you liked me. i have no idea what love's supposed to feel like, but if it's meant to be like this i wish it wasn’t so easy to pronounce. 

9. i can get so confident with love. i say it once and suddenly i feel like i can say it a hundred more times. i wish it wasn’t so easy to say. 

10. and i wish they didn’t sell it as something red. 

11. it’s orange.

12. it's bird beaks and fossilized flies in amber. traffic cones on the side of the road. egg yolks when they're running and rust at the bottom of the stove.

13. it's you and me.

14. but i don’t want to write about you. everything becomes real when it’s written. it’s no longer safe as a thought. it becomes yours just as much as it is mine. and it’s all a bit too predictable if i just wrote about you. like growing into shoes. i don’t believe in fate. and i don’t believe everything you said to me.

15. i want to write about orange.

16. do you know the feeling when you burn the side of you hand and you should run it under cold water but you don’t? and so it welts. and you brush your finger against it, again and again, and it aches but not like how any other injury aches. that’s what orange is to me. 

17. i wouldn’t say i was ever in love with orange. my mother hated orange and she didn’t hate many things. maybe my interest in it, my desire to love it more, is an act of rebellion. 

18. regardless, orange isn’t a color i collect. or find particular muse. or look for. but i think it thrives off that. off needing to be loved more.

19. i read criticism for writing like this. they write about trends of aestheticizing absurd, lonely, sad things and how it’s an epidemic of literature, leaving it as ruins. too much sorrow and not enough relief. i don’t think literature’s being ruined. epidemics kill off entire worlds and leave only rocks, and from them you have to build a new city. i don’t think it’s an epidemic to pick up these rocks. it’s not useless to be here like how so many of us are. i think it’s more useless to watch and wait and take up space in a city you were never built for.

20. one thing i do find admirable about the color orange is how hard it tries to be a happy color. it has all of the pieces, all of the intrinsic potential, but it falls short every single time. it’s the designated color of autumn—when everything dies but it looks beautiful enough to be poetic. i mean, here i am, trying to write about it. trying to make it something it’s not.

21. it’s you and me.