Oranges

I once had a lover who loved the color orange, but not as much as he loved storytelling. The stories he told were always compelling, and it was clear that he had a passion for writing. He even told me he wanted to be a writer. Naturally, as an artist, I had absentmindedly promised him to illustrate his books, and naturally, in the moment we had thought nothing of it. When we were together, I often painted him oranges, but upon receiving them, he wouldn’t say anything about the paintings. Back then, I would wonder about the absence of his response; the thought of doing something for someone with no feedback bothered me day and night. The feeling, seemingly equivalent to the action of someone having hit the space bar twice accidentally amidst a paragraph, and now bothering me, is the existence of a gap. However, as time persisted, so did the absence of his replies. And the more we grew apart, the more I painted those still lifes, the warm hue, the orange, splattered across canvas after canvas. As I tried to force my paintings and my act of love, it started to feel like I was pushing him away. And the thing about spaces between paragraphs is that they are meant to separate words from one another, and sometimes, when you’re too caught up in deleting the spaces you accidentally typed, you go too far and delete the words you were trying to write. I guess the gap was always meant to be there, for in the absence of words to say, within that one centimeter of white nothing, was all the love we had held on to, amidst the floods of sentences, the string of letters organized to spell out the memories, the time we spent together. And as I become another memory to him, another story to tell, a familiar reminder to never over-love something as much as I did those oranges, I remember our first conversation. He never really loved oranges; he just adored the color of them.