My mom told me the local supermarket had a sale on oranges this week. I don’t even really like oranges, but I know they’re good for you, especially in the winter months, so I trudged inside. I stared down a bin of misshapen orange lumps, contemplating if I really wanted them. If I could even afford the “10 oranges for TEN DOLLARS” sign hanging haphazardly above them, seeing as how I already overdrafted this week. She claimed they were the best oranges she’d had in quite some time. Had she gone mad? This was the most unappealing, tragic, and demented looking group of citrus I’d ever seen. Why did I even come to the supermarket?
I picked one up and ran my fingers over the bumps and divots that cradled the saturated inside like a cocoon. The imperfectness made me think of the boy who told me he loved me last month.
He slurred those three words drunk and wrapped up in my sheets in the early morning. I swore I wouldn’t let him in again but his message at midnight made me crack like the ice under my gray winter boots outside the confines of my apartment.
“That can’t possibly be true,” I laughed, my head on his chest. He grimaced at this.
“Of course it’s true,” he said, quite matter of factly while his fingers twirled through the curls in my hair. He still smelled like cheap beer and cigarettes.
I wanted it to be true. Every fiber of my being wanted it to be true, ached for it really. It didn’t even necessarily have to be him. I wanted to be seen, to be really truly looked and thought of. I wanted to be the lumpy orange with divots that he picked up, overlooking the imperfectness. Deciding, “This is it. This is the one going in my shopping bag coming home with me. This is the one I want to peel slowly, delicately”.
Instead, I cushioned the navel orange in my hand while hot tears pricked at my retinas, threatening to ruin the new maroon mascara I was trying out/ I shoved ten misshapen and lumpy oranges into my reusable shopping bag, knowing they’d sit on my counter until they rotted.
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