(Jan. 2025) Another Orange

Another orange? says a classmate as I roll a satsuma between my palms. Um yeah. Citrus is delicious in the winter time and everyone is getting ill. I don’t quite know what she means by that question but I dig in my nail and see a little cloud of orange oil float away. I’m learning about taxes and the room smells sweet.

So it’s February and it’s time to become new. It’s time to cull away bad habits. It’s the beginning of the year, but the year is cold and there is no sun. The sun is on earth and everything burns.

I am practicing talking by trying to make friends with two people whom I see regularly at school. One is the crossing guard at the busy intersection. One is the nighttime security guard. They both smile at me and we chat. I don’t know why I’m always nervous. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to focus these days. I try to just leave a good impression and keep moving on with the day. And then walking to my car I notice my foot hurts and so I focus on that instead.

I’ll miss you, P mumbles in half-sleep as I get up in the middle of the night. I think a lot about that, and I think about sweetness and levity in the winter. Lately I feel seen in the way that people who build computers assemble those transparent computers. (Bad simile?) It’s nice to be paid attention to. It’s life-affirming to have energy reciprocated. I’m still whirring and exhaling but maybe some people can see where the air comes from.

I was writing this during my office hours as a TA for a writing class. I had a good idea for this blog post when one of my students came to ask a question. I can’t resent them for that; that’s why I was sitting there. But now I can’t remember it and I’m weighing that against the thought that I sometimes feel like writing is the only reason not to cryogenically freeze myself into the future.

We’ll see, I say about a hundred times a day in every conversation. I think I’m passively obsessed with the future because it is so unknown. And I take refuge in that, as opposed to the past, which is not only known, but also potentially terrible–at least when I lie awake in bed because the Trader Joe’s melatonin is too weak. But. The future can only be reassuring if I’m relatively certain I’ll get there. That enough is reason to be optimistic. So I’m sending out this prayer for the new year. I’ll imagine the world is an orange and it is sweet in the winter.