She is the embodiment of the phrase “all the lonely people.” When you see her, you are immediately unsure if she is awaiting someone, a suitor maybe, a relative, an acquaintance, or if, perhaps, she is unaccompanied by choice, hiding in the neon spotlight of a flickering open sign she knows far too well.
You want to say you recognize her, the woman in the tangerine trench coat sitting alone at the bar, tracing the grain of the cherry oak bartop—back and forth and around and around—with a delicate knuckle of her right hand as she twirls the stem of her glass in her left. Her hair is a soaked chaotic neutral and decimates any chance you might’ve had to catch a glimpse of her face; even though you cannot see her sunken eyes, drooping and bloodshot, you can feel her insomnia brushing against you.
Her aura is a Saturday night kind of pink—she is a Saturday night kind of pink. She is the pink of bright lights in a small space throbbing with that electronic rubbish that no one really listens to but they play incessantly in clubs that leaves you dazed and in want of a date with Earl Grey and a lazy boy, a quiet melody humming listlessly in the background. She is the pink of running through the rain, Democracy Dies in Darkness melting above heads thrown back to release a gift to the stars and hope that it is well received. The pink that glows in the background of the title of the indie film that you’re viewing at the local cinema that sits across from the pizza place with the sign that says “Livin’ La Pizza Loca,” whose floors are always sticky with residue from who knows what. She is what it feels like to look into someone’s eyes and just know that this is it. She feels like pink to you, like Saturday night pink, and you wonder how she sees herself.
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When you were young, you had those matching socks and underwear that had the names of each day of the week on them, and were each a specific color for a specific day. You cared less about wearing the right ones on the correct days of the week, and more about which color fit with which day. For example, your Tuesday set was green with yellow lettering, but to you, green was Thursday’s color. So you wore your Tuesday set on Thursday. And the Thursday set was yellow, but yellow belonged to Monday, so you always wore Thursday on Monday. So on and so forth.
The only set you wore on the correct day was Saturday. Saturday was pink. It had always felt pink to you: no school, Momma home to play with you, trips to go watch the big jet planes whizz right overhead, little hands holding on to massive knuckles, eyes wide in awe of the butterflies and the ginormous elephant. Pink was happiness, and Saturday was happiness, so you always wore pink on Saturday. Hanna Andersson got that one right.
Now you are older and no longer have the luxury of labeled underwear to remind you what day of the week it is. Instead you are forced to wallow in your colors, reach for the memories of which color went with which day as a child. Saturday is still pink, but for different reasons. Your computer screen turns pink to reduce blue light when you are up late at night working, or watching the newest Netflix romantic comedy while the city bustles outside your window. You’ve now realized that this program that filters out light to help you sleep is pointless, because you would never be able to fall asleep anyway, but you leave it installed, hoping that one day the job it does will be of some use to you, and because you adore the wild color it turns your screen.
Saturdays that you are not drowning in work or television in your flat, you are sitting by a 300-year-old tree, working your fingers through the grooves, tracing the grain, wondering where this majestic beast lived before being transported to a lousy bar in Adams Morgan. It seems like you only come here when it rains, and you have left more umbrellas there than you can count: each time you grab one to try and run home, you realize that it is one you have left behind before. The next time you arrive, you leave it again. Try as you may, you never seem to have one for both arrival and departure. You can guarantee that you will be caught in the deluge one way or another.
The overheard sign at this particular bar is pink, and you think that it might be part of the reason you waltzed in the first time whilst escaping the rain. Most people go to bars to be with friends, or at least to try and meet other people, but you come here to be alone, which may be odd, but it fits. You have become increasingly aware of how you are only a passing thought to most, and it scares you, so you try not to think about it, but you can’t not think about it and so again you are stuck in the never-ending loop of listening to your own thoughts that you never wanted to hear.
So you go out and sit on the corner and wait for something miraculous to happen, but it never does, so you go to Kramerbooks and browse through books about a family’s doughnut shop during World War XIV and how society is doomed. You walk out with a book of Things To Shout Out Loud At Parties and go to Krispy Kreme because reading the summary of that one book made you really hungry. Glazed doughnut melting in hand, you clamber onto the Metro and watch the evening commuters climbing on and off and the sports fans climbing on and on and on. There is a small girl sitting across from you in a ladybug raincoat and magenta wellies, and you wave at the little monkey only to receive a cross-eyed grin in return. You trade stuck-out tongues and moose ears for a couple stops until her mother clutches her hand and they gracefully exit the train at Woodley. She gives you one last bubble from her chewing gum paired with a toothless grin before she pitter-patters away. You wonder if her socks say Saturday on them.
When you were seventeen, you read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Sunday changed from orange to grey. Thomas Hardy once wrote that “in the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.”
When you were seventeen you loved the way it sounded. The color that it made you feel. Now, you understand.