My mother’s favorite color is orange. I never liked it. She always used to say orange was a deceptive neutral.
“You can wear orange with anything. It matches every color.”
Orange is also my little brother’s favorite color. Because of David’s neurological diversity, a favorite color is more than the color you choose to paint your walls. A favorite anything is an admission of understanding amidst a world that almost never makes sense.
So here I was, with the most compelling reason I could think of to love the color, and yet, I didn’t get it. To me, orange just wasn’t natural looking. As a color, it was caught in an unfortunate identity crisis between yellow and brown, and everyone was just letting it be while it refused to make up its mind. Sure pumpkins are orange, carrots are orange, and in 2016, presidential candidates are orange. Barring that last example, one could easily argue: orange is a completely natural color. It has a fruit named after it for goodness sake.
Still, I could not get on board. I never hesitated to answer orange when someone asked my least favorite color.
That was until the past couple months. The more I looked into my closet the more orange I found. At first, I ignored it. Everyone is allowed to wear their least favorite color. Right?
But after a time, it became impossible to ignore. More and more of my favorite articles of clothing were orange. In clothing stores, I gravitated toward orange blouses; shopping for school supplies, I chose orange notebooks; on the street, I noticed girls wearing orange. My fascination grew enough that others began to take notice.
“Is orange one of your favorite colors? You wear it a lot.”
No. No it most definitely is not. Pink is my favorite color, and it has been since the fairy godmothers themselves wove Sleeping Beauty that gorgeous gown and that is the way that it will stay.
Still I could not ignore the facts. Some of my favorite dresses were orange, and from the looks of it, orange was here to stay.
Excuse my theatrics over a color. This whole post sounds a lot like much ado about nothing, but maybe the reason I am so reluctant to admit my differing opinion about this color is because it is not the only thing that has changed lately that I never expected changing.
Exactly two weeks ago, I moved to a city with no job and the ability to count my friends on one hand. I moved here to follow in the footsteps of a long line of artists, writers, musicians and so on in search of purpose driven work. This description only heightens the already romanticized idea.
Everyone dreams of the 20 something living in New York life: the Carrie Bradshaw-esque career, the Holly Golightly parties, and of course the Serena Vanderwoodsen clothes. In truth, I ate carrots and hummus for dinner. This morning, I did my make-up at Sephora with their free testers. Funny how no one makes that into a drama on the CW.
I have no idea what activities will fill my day tomorrow, but this is the place, the best place, to find a job in the industry I want. I know that. I always knew that, but somehow, I never thought I would be here. I never thought I would spend my last semester of college interning in the fashion closet of a magazine and I certainly never thought I would be 22 living in New York City, filling out endless job applications, eating 4 day old leftover take out all the while wearing orange.
Don’t mistake my grumblings for unhappiness. My experience here has been an unexpected type of wonderful that can only make sense combined with tiny inconveniences like losing your keys in Central Park.
Maybe this orange thing is a easy distraction from real things I worry about: finding a job, paying my rent, maintaining a semblance of a social life, maybe it is a sign that I am much more like my mother than I ever thought, but maybe it is a reminder that even in uncertainty and change, I can always hope for a little orange.
Orange Bikini Top: Triangl
