The aftermath of a nuclear war has turned all grass purple and the clouds in the sky orange. Everyone loves it except you. You freaking hate orange.
Everyone loves the new colors of the world. Purple grass and orange skies like the sun bursted and oozed over the Earth. It’s nothing like the blue and green I remembered before the war. We must look like a dead planet from out of space; no resources, no life.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” they’ll tell me whenever I hold visible disgust to the sky. But everyone who told me this is either an over-the-top optimistic or someone who was born after the war. They think that people like me are just ‘clinging to the past’. That has to be the most truthful statement I heard in a while.
I got over the sickness after months of living in the reformed world. The stark contrast of colors used to give me headaches and eye pains, along with a pain in the heart. Now, they only serve as a daily reminder for something.
Orange was my mom’s favorite color.
At first, I used to think it was a weird color to love. But she was one of the few people who could pull it off. She did it by not making everything orange or loved it to the point the color seemed obnoxious; she loved orange in the best ways I could remember her.
She loved working at the little flower shop downtown. She could make small, simple bouquets you couldn’t forget. Her eyes were always trained on the color coordination of the flowers and which types she was going to use for each occasion. The ones I remembered were orange and red, orange and white, and orange and pink.
The backyard was green with flowers growing everywhere. Besides me, they were her pride. She would wear sundresses and walk around the back, barefoot and a tangerine in hand. Whenever I went up to kiss her or hug her, she smelled of the citrus.
And there was a date night where I remembered her talking to the babysitter about my meal and bedtime. She was in a light orange dress, her brown hair curled down her back. She had knelt down to me and told me that she was going on a date. She had softly squealed like a teenage girl and gave me a kiss, telling me that she’ll be back.
She never did. The bomb dropped and took everything: the flowers, my mom, the guy I saw as a dad. And my admiration for the color orange.
In the aftermath, I tried to pull myself through with optimism. I told myself that because the sky was orange, then my mom was always with me. But it was a lie I kept feeding myself and I got tired of it soon.
So everyday I hope that whatever cause the war started for, it was the right thing. Because now I have to live with the constant reminder of what I lost.
😢
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