Orange is the most lonely awkward color
Raffi Robert Kiureghian
That night they lie together in Peter's bed while his roommate is asleep. The refrigerator makes a humming sound, and outside he can hear the birds shrieking, footsteps, some laughing. He looks at her face. It is across from him in the dark—close, at a close enough distance for him to touch the pouch of skin beneath her right eye.
"You are leaving tomorrow," he says.
"Actually in like, four hours," she says.
He pulls the cover of their heads. He can't see her, and this confuses him and makes him feel heavy and lost, so he almost pulls it back down, but Caroline opens her cell phone so that her face is lit by a dim blue glow.
To himself, Peter keeps saying it—four hours, four hours—like a little sad song, maybe, a reminder, an alarm, he doesn’t know.
He tries to contort his face into a comfortable and reassuring expression. The sheet beside his face rises and falls with his breaths.
Peter feels overly introspective.
The sheet rises, falls.
"Do you feel secure with me?" he asks.
She nods her head.
"Really?"
"I don't know," she says. Her hand is touching his face. "I am scared."
Peter covers his head with the pillow and does not respond. Her breath is warm against his cheek, and he feels a calm content that has eluded him for months now—awful, frigid months. Months in which they were apart, and he was terrified, and she cried in the evenings, sobbed into the phone at night as he expressed his sadness and confusion and other assorted feelings of distance and emptiness.
They would sleep separately, in different states—and it wasn’t awful, the sleeping alone, the loneliness, but there was a cold feeling Peter was left with when he awoke. Maybe I am just alone always, he thinks. He puts his face into the pillow again. Unless, I don’t know, someone is sleeping next to me.
The night outside is black with white and grey spots. Peter feels calm, effortless. He feels round. He does not want to talk—wants instead to listen and fall asleep to the sound of footsteps, voices.
They fall asleep.
In the morning Peter realizes that he has never known cold. He takes short breaths and does not feel his face as he walks to the taxi at 5:55 am.
Caroline is already there. His eyes are heavy with only three hours of sleep, and everything in the morning haze seems distant. The driver listens to gangster rap. Peter feels uncomfortable—wonders who, really, listens to gangster rap at six in the morning. The thought distracts him for a few moments.
Through the window he can see the air. It is black, or orange—black and orange, with streetlights. Caroline puts her head on his shoulder and he looks down at her face, at her cavernous dimples, her freckles like myriad imperceptible lights left on in far-away buildings. What a distant feeling, to see her slowly falling away like this—like maybe he is vaguely watching her float down a mountain; her, a sheet of paper.
Next to the train, he removes himself from the trembling inside of his chest, the gnawing. He takes her face in his hands and holds it, saying things—reassuring things. If I were a spectator, he thinks, letting her turn around, this would maybe be pretty.
She walks into the train, sits down.
Peter watches it leave, standing above, on a bridge, standing and waiting for a taxi