It's what makes the world look healthy, I've always thought. Especially times like this, when everyone is crammed up indoors to "beat the heat", cursing the sun for casting it's light. I've thought about it almost every time I've seen the sun, and I only ever see health.
The way the clouds pulse with the light and dark oranges in the morning, reflecting the colors of the sun. I know it has to do with wavelengths and particles scattering about the atmosphere, but I can't help but to imagine the clouds growing arms and pulling handfuls of heat from the sun, slowly easing the health back into the day. I can't help but to imagine the clouds sweating themselves in exertion, sweating drops of orange heat into the ground to save us all from freezing while we sleep, unaware of the sun fighting to get itself up for us.
I used to like to burn my eyes, as a child. I used to laugh when the orange burned into deep purples and dull greens behind my eyes, as if I had absorbed all of the color myself and the orange could no longer project. I loved to close my eyes against the sun and watch the dark, fiddled vision become engulfed by the orange of the sun reflecting through my eyelids. I loved that the muddled dark colors would always be overtaken again by the orange, the natural, healthy orange of my eyelids.
I love the way skin tans into orange, showing off it's vitamin D and it's life. The peeling skin patterned by pale and orange boasts a different kind of healthy, as if wearing it is a badge of living life to the fullest. A healthy mind might skip on the sunscreen if it is caught up in happiness.
I could never wear red blush. It seems unnaturally stand-offish on my face, as if I have become too sick or too cold to keep the blood inside of myself. Orange is a nice flush to the colors in my face, a more natural sort of look, less intimidating.
Sometimes I plant my feet closer than necessary to the bonfire so that I can feel my skin burning. As the orange reflects off of my shiny shinbones, I close my eyes and think back to the earliest days, in which men fought wars over the beautiful swarm of heat melting into my skin. I think of how, in some other life, this sea of color could have been life and death.
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