There's nothing in the Orange

Elexis thinks. She thinks and thinks and thoughts so hard that everything is always, irrevocably, on her mind. This is most particularly so in regard to the Orange.

The Orange is a phenomena, a sign. A written story across the sky to tell you something, if you’d just think about it long enough. Elexis refers to her orange most typically with the men of her life. To see the Orange sometimes meant a YES! Or a no - time to move on. Sometimes she reflected on the Orange and saw in it’s tangerine rays a secret, hidden sign. This one told her it was actually the other guy, the one you didn’t expect.

The thing was, she expected everything. She cried over what if’s and lived lives in her head as she wriggled raw salmon out their ugly, slippery, wet packaging. She always ate salmon.

Sometimes she felt like those fish. Pale. Exposed. The feeling of getting out a warm bath to your frigid flat during winter. The water drying and then cracking your parched skin. The itch on that part of your back you can’t reach to put cream on.

This time, Elexis doesn’t paint his thumbs. She stands, deer in headlights, as she opens her door to him. She pants like a door-mouse clocking an owl in the sky as he leans his forehead on hers. She relinquishes to him, when she knows she should stand and fight. Scream. Wage. She gets in the bath when she knows she shouldn’t. She wears the skirt when it’s too soon. Elexis thinks about how clever she is being, how the Orange knew about this. How it was all meant to be. This is what it meant.

Then, like the sun finally setting, the scene goes dark. The Orange isn’t there to cast the sky in great uncommon colours anymore. The wonder is gone. Watching a different sun rise over the sky on a cold day, she wears his jacket and thinks of change. How she has, he has, someone could have, one should have. No one ever changed until its too late.

This is the crucial thing: Elexis is thinking. She’s imagining (she’s great at that). He is not her Orange. He isn’t in it nor does he care for its display. Its too late, though. Elexis has already started giving and she cannot stop. She will pour and pour so that he may be more buoyant. Her heart sits beside his in his chest, and he floats all the better for it. She tips over, drowning, to watch the colours cast over the waters surface. She’s crushed in the depths to see no colour, no twinkle, no surface. The world is black and more black. The Orange was a lit end of a cigarette being tugged into his mouth, and he’s smoked the whole thing.

Drowning is a strange sensation. It is a place of thought. It is, Elexis argues, the most peaceful kind of death. She has thought so since she was sixteen. She's hit the seabed now, and turns in the swarm of sand to face the surface. It does twinkle, slightly. The moon has begun to cast it's light casually across the space. It is all she can see. As Elexis' lungs give in and she gulps a breath, hoping for air, she chokes. Choking is the hardest part. Acknowledging the loss. Giving in. There is no going back, now. She convulses, with her bodies urge to expel, expel, but all she does is gulp more water in. Then, she's still again. Her brain hasn't shut down yet, none of her body has. She still has a few moments of her heart beating.

It reminds her of when she laid in the bath, perfectly still, to watch her heartbeat reverberate the water.

She told him she'd never see him again. She was wrong. Now that she's right, was it worth it? To never see the Orange again? Wish upon it's light?