The Orange
When he was younger, he acted like he had nothing to lose. The simmering sulkiness of the mid-afternoon sun played like hot grease on his face, though the item he was cooking was unknown. Maybe it was the nonchalance and fortitude of youth, out there in the sun-soaked yards and playgrounds and swings of the larger parks. The other kids need not have liked him, but among the slides and monkey bars the deftness of touch is necessary more so than popularity. He was good at the monkey bars especially so and it took no effort to weasel his orangutan arms across. The true show of his animal-like strength however was the swing. The indomitable swing that he rode until the extreme point of its arc, the pencil spun by the compass, and then dived off like a scuba diver plunging into seemingly insurmountable depths. Only the scuba diver demands all kinds of gear to survive the lack of air. Lack of breath, breathless. Here he was to survive the opposite, and with no gear but a reckless grin and scraped knees made hardy by bygone battles. The blazing acceleration of air while he plunged through, cannoned to the ground by a gravity none could surmount though they might try. He survived and planted his two feet on the ground, a veritable acrobat churning tricks for the masses that became the same scornful classmates during the dull school days.
The point being he acted like a child, with nothing to lose. In youth there is no time, hence no past to consider with regret and embarrassment as tough as the trunks of millennia-old oak trees. There is also no future to mull over with existential angst, the manifestation of old reams of dust-riddled philosophy textbooks.
He spoke now like an adult. Acted like one too. Spoon-fed with modern indoctrination of being. Meaning? Meaning the input was stress with an extra dollop of stress, only the output was stress medicated with antidepressants, supplied by the same giant suppliers or corporate behemoths that supplied the original stress. Ironic? A conspiracy of tragic proportions? He thought: yes. Past and future were concrete, and he sat long hours in dread of thoughts about such sadness and melancholy that can only be thought of by deep souls. His thoughts unfurled in ways so mysterious that no beings lower than he (and of those there were plenty like so much fish in the sea, ecological disasters of these days notwithstanding) could guess at them in their specificity, and even the general gist was lost in plumes of potent language. Yes, he wrote in his diary, in his future days of fame (posthumous of course, for he was assured he would die young and tragically), they would pore over his journals in thrall at the wondrous obscurity of his depths, as unknown but certainly profound as the shadowed sunk bottoms of water wells, even the throw of a rock dispelling no sound. Such was the climb in to the being within.
He sat at his desk regarding with imperceptible keenness the orange tree outside. The orange tree like a shrine in a yard strewn with socks fresh from the laundry and dank from the dirty rain. A paradox. The tree reeked of the fresh bloom of orange and it appeared strange to him that the smell should evoke the colour, and the colour the smell. Orange. Oh that one perfect orange carried all and one in itself! His mother wandered in and stood by his desk, casting a diagonal shadow that veiled some of his sketched words and emphasised others by the palpable absence of shadow. He wondered at the words enlightened, and what that meant.
“Mum,” he looked up, “What do you think of the orange tree?”
She looked forlorn, weeping from the absence of the green stuff, the money in plainer terms, to pay the hefty bills. She had wrinkles as old as age itself and her weather worn cardigan was stale like so much bread. She was the archetype of the aging mother, hiding in lost corners of moth-infested homes, between her daily excursions to dreary offices under fluorescent strobes. Taking calls of spewing customers like a punching bag.
Mother ignored the question, and he thought this was telling. She tried to deflect by asking of his degree in writing and prospects for work. These were superfluous questions drowning in redundancy.
But what of now, the orange?
Presently she left and he returned to his musings. His teeth chattered, and he wondered if this was from the cold draft reeking through the open window, like lava pouring from a cracked volcano, or the after effects of some woeful thought of misery. Surely the orange was a cure. The orange, in its warm glow, could light the heart. He pictured a hollowed pumpkin made whole again with a candle and its single flame. Was it all so easy as that?
He dressed for an evening out seeking pleasures of the intellect. The writing group was a fascinating cohort of wonder. They all sat in a circle charging on the fuel of coffee sourced from locations afar but close to the soul. The coffee was black but the look in their eyes was bright. Bright like lit coals. Fires blazing. So they pooled insights and epiphanies and those rhetorical questions.
What was the meaning of it all? How to survive and thrive and yet stay close to the beating pulp on the turf of the soil?
Others would pass by the outskirts of the group and regard them in wonderment. They knew what the others did not. A couple close by was heard by he, saying as such: movie so and so was not so good, because the special effects did not seem on par with modern standards. And so what of it?! He chided, his words not verbal but echoes in the chambers of his own mind. But his look strayed to them and said enough to perplex them and make their voices hush. They knew of nothing.
He wore a frown like a badge and his eyebrows were bushy, his beard reasonably dishevelled. His glass lens, a wondrous shape somewhere between a square and a hexagon. He was unkempt but in that peculiar way stamping him and also his cohort, those not party to his group in immediacy only but sweeping the space-time continuum in a sense unfamiliar to physicists. He had no time for beauty when he was stuck in the woes of pondering questions that haunt us all, but only those of his calibre have the courage to ponder or the will to test in lived experience. And the gourmet delicacy of the approach was an obscurity dashing like a red velvet curtain between the worthy and the unworthy. The unworthy could not understand, not because they were unworthy but because making them feel unworthy killed two birds with one stone: superiority and needing not say anything that made sense to begin with. What of the worthy? Did they understand the notions of obscurity that they tugged at with furled fingers out of their parted lips like a magician would whistle out a balloon caressed by saliva in successions of raging colour? Well, no. For them meaning was beside the point, as was conveying meaning that bestowed transformative power. It was the affectations they craved and the look of awe it lent them. What of substance, when you have the orange?
