My Favourite Shade of Orange and Melancholy

As the days grow colder, one begins to reminisce and romanticize those summer nights. In the heat, memories can run and warp like an old photograph, leaving only the most vivid and festering bursts of remembrance. A breeze lifts my hair and rustles the changing leaves.

In those restless times, the concept of time itself becomes irrelevant. Sitting beneath the trees in a breeze tinged with the decay of a season, I remember the boy with tye broken watch.

It was a scorching night in mid May. Like other restless youth, I found myself in a crisis of identity and stuck at a crossroads of boredom and tension. We sought solace in terrible live music performed by our peers. The concerts were held in an old barn just outside of town and by midnight, it was packed with people.

This night, it was particularly crowded. Instead of bad songs covered by even worse musicians with an aura of a dying camel, smooth jazz filled the air. Everyrhing vibrated and glittered with the decadent tones of the guitar and bass on stage; the splash of the hihat a burst of fireworks. From where I stood, I couldn't see the stage. However, I soon felt the tug of intuition and pushed my way to the front.

The crowd parted and I found myself face to toe with the band's singer. I craned my neck to see his face silhouetted against the stage lights, his gold-orange hair a radiant halo.
He sang in a lilting and sultry tone, enchanting the entire crowd.

Something shiny caught my eye and brought me out of my gawping reverie. He wore a watch on his left wrist, deep cracks in the glass front caught the light. The face was rusted and the hands hadn't even thought of moving in decades. I vaguely mused about what he was wearing a broken watch for.

Disappointment interrupted my thoughts as the last song ended. The air was still thick with the sweet reverberations from the music. The singer waved to the crowd, smiled, and looked down, meeting my gaze. Iy felt as though not the watch, but time itself was broken. As though the fabric of time wrapped around the two of us. The only light was from his luminous blue eyes and the mangled watch.

Something immense ripped through my soul, leaving it vulnerable to infection of the most despicable kind: affection. A warm-fuzzy tingly feeling crawled over my skin and reddened my cheeks.

All too soon, the moment was over and the band packed up their instruments. I blinked, attempting to regain my senses. The crowd had started to disperse but I remained, gawking at the empty stage with my mouth hanging open.

Just seconds ago, the universe had compressed around my heart and soul; cosmic emotion beating through every fiber of my being. Everything has slowed into harmonics and light. Now, I was just in that dilapidated old barn standing in the wake of the crowd and the music.

I closed my mouth and frowned. The rush had left me empty in the absence of his blue eyes. I sloughed my way home and tried to forget tge feelings that had overwhelmed me.

For the following days, I still felt ragged and a crushing hollow feeling rattled me to the core. Just a few minutes of exposure to that singer and his.music rotted my heart, making it soft and squishy and susceptible to corruption. No wonder jazz music had been so taboo in the beginning, it's a drug that dialates the eyes of your soul.

I usually thought of myself as a strong-willed woman, not easily swept off ny feet. It seemed, however that I had a weakness. And tgat was boys with orange hair and broken watches.

Thanks to he Fates' puppetry, I had been reduced to a shell of a human, drifting through the days in a shocked and befuddled shuffle. I could walk for miles, moving but going nowhere. I could hear hours of conversation, but not listen. Everything was just noise compared to the beauty of his voice.