Tangerine Trees and Marmalade Skies
She had never before paid so much attention to the colors on the streets around her. Everything was so colorful. Red awnings on local restaurants, dark green streetlamp posts, blue roofs on tall and skinny apartment buildings. Had things always been this colorful?
Suddenly everything was interesting. The way people moved to the left side of the sidewalk instead of the right when she had to pass them. The little guy that lit up for the walk signal when she had to cross the street was so cute. There were tangerine trees planted in little square cut outs on the sidewalk and flowers on the corners.
Every evening the sun descended into the horizon and turned the sky into a blanket of marmalade placed gently over the city as if to tuck everyone in with a little kiss on the forehead.
The food tasted better here too. Basic things, like bread and pasta and even the fresh vegetables in salads, felt gourmet. Eating out by herself became an event. She would get all dolled up, blow dry her hair, dab some blush on her cheeks, grab her little purse and stroll around the streets like a character in an old movie. She would eat tangerines at the park in a summer dress sitting on a plaid picnic blanket. Sometimes she half expected a handsome man to walk up to her with a canvas and oil paint and immortalize her beauty in a painting.
The first maybe month and a half went on like this. The magic of a new city sitting on the bridge of her nose like rose-tinted glasses that made everything she saw glow and sparkle. But as time passed, the color on the glasses began to fade and the magic dissipated. The tangerine trees attracted fruit flies that hung in the air like clouds that she had to bat away as she walked by. The marmalade skies were no longer bright enough to pull her eyes from her phone or her feet as she picked her way down sidewalks cracked from the roots of trees that were never meant to be jailed in concrete squares.
Her mind got used to the brightly colored streets and stopped alerting her of their energy. She no longer stumbled smilingly through her orders at coffee shops nor spent time pouring over menus at restaurants. Eating out was no longer a fun event but an expensive nuisance.
After a whole year passed, nothing was novel about this new city anymore, and it just became another place that she lived. And she got antsy. She itched for newness, for beauty. This city had become too ordinary. She eventually packed up her stuff and set off to find a new city. One that was more colorful. One that had new customs and habits she could learn. One with better tasting food.
She spent the better part of her life chasing newness after newness always wondering why every city eventually lost its color and magic. She never realized that all she had to do was polish off those rose-tinted glasses, push them back up her nose and blink away the habits because the tangerine trees and marmalade skies are always there, the mind just forgets to see them after a while.