| Orange,
everything is orange.
We are at a steady pace, swiftly, yet vaguely relaxed. I
learned the stride three years ago. It is not my geographically and genetically
birthed saunter. I am told that naturally, I have a lot of upward movement as I
walk. In other words; I bounce. But not now, Skinner would be proud, it is classical
conditioning at its best (or worst). When outside, I must walk intently. The
stimuli was the numb Chicago
winter. The response was the fleeing, of all of us, to the next shelter of
warmth. All of us brace for the cold even on a sunny day.
Nights are always orange. Of course, all nights are black
too, like thick coffee, but here they are always orange. Not comforting golden
rays of sunlight orange, but dark oppressive orange. In the winter, there are
no trees to hide the lights. Only possessed skeletons. In coffee. I despair. Sometimes
I hate. Everything is orange.
Doug and I are at a steady pace, swiftly, yet vaguely
relaxed. We are at the point in a friendship where we are figuring each other
out. I am trying to understand the matrix of relationships and time that has
compiled this individual that strides next to me. He depicts a newly found love
and we share a loaf of bread I picked up at the grocery. We talk about anxiety,
love, old and new friendships, Pittsburg,
marriage and break-ups, and roommates. I break off another piece of bread and
hand it to him. We navigate the sidewalks.
Our conversation turns to apples cider. When I was younger,
in the summertime, I would often come back to my house after playing tag or
exploring the valley I lived in and find my grandma’s car in the drive way. A
surge of anticipation would well up inside of me because I knew, chances were,
that my grandma had borne sacred things to our home from a particular farm the
next county over. I would run inside and find on the counter in the laundry
room a white box with apple pie in it. In my family we have two unspoken
traditions, we always keep our pies in the laundry room and we always eat those
pies for breakfast. My father has said that eating pie for breakfast is a
family tradition from our long lost relatives in Sweden. Passing through the laundry
room, I would sprint to the refrigerator to behold two plastic jugs, a gallon
each, of apple cider. I remember the texture of the jugs and their weight held
in both of my hands as I pulled it out of the cold, my hands still warm from
the heat of summer. I removed the red cap, poured, and drank deeply. Fruition.
We pass in front of a taxi on the street in front of his
apartment. Everything is orange. But something is new. We slow to a stop at the
same time in front of a skeleton tree, its possession pouring from a
streetlight directly behind it. Something is new. We look closer and see the
barely budding leaves, just enough green to register in our retinas. The
possession wanes for a moment and the anticipation in the limbs of a dead body
is the rising crescendo of a season of silent expectation.
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