Orange.
There are many things you can associate with that colour. Of course, the first thing you think of is the fruit itself. That round ball of citrus goodness that you see on those adverts. Squeeze it and the liquid of life flows out of it into your glass and then you can drink it. And still, the liquid is orange. Everything about it is orange. Hence the name. Orange.
There's other food as well that are orange. Pumpkins, for example. They're orange. You carve faces into them on the day named Halloween. Depending on the inhabitants of your household, or even your own preferences, you make scary faces or cute ones. And then inside you pop a little candle to make the features glow and leave it on your window for the whole world to admire as they walk past.
That's another thing. Fire. The source of heat on a winter's evening. The instrument used to roast those marshmallows for your friends in the middle of a beach at midnight. The beginning of that first drag from your cigarette. The flicker in the darkness on top of the candle in the middle of a powercut. The tragic end of life in a disastrous natural occurrence that kills not only people, but the forest it started in. Yep. That's fire in a nutshell. In all its forms.
On that note, leaves can be orange too. Not always. But as the year goes on, the once green leaves turn orange. Making the world into that autumn wonderland that pleases the eye as you're walking through the scenery. Dancing in the air as their natural life comes to an end, preparing their home for the next stage in their life.
Completely different from that is Mars. That large planet sandwiched between us and Jupiter. The supposed home of the martians that Area 51 are keeping hush-hush from us. It's surface looks so smooth to us through or telescopes and you long to go and live on it just to run your hand along it. And yet that orange air is deadly. 95% carbon monoxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon and the rest is just trace amounts of oxygen, water vapour and various other gases. Life as we know it would perish there. And still, we think of it as the beautiful 'orange' planet.
And more down to Earth is hair. Hair can also be orange. Obviously, we don't go around calling the colour 'orange'. We call it red. Those that bear a head of glorious orange hair are called 'redheads'. Cinnamon, crimson, copper, strawberry blonde or just straight up ginger. All beautiful in their own way. Beautiful shades of orange that we humans are totally in charge of. And yet it comes with a certain amount of shame too. If you own one of those shades of hair colour, you could be the victim of abuse from insensitive dicks that think being a blonde bimbo is how the world is meant to be. But no. They're wrong. So very, very wrong.
All those things. Every single one of them you would naturally associate with the word 'orange'. They leave a vivid image in your mind and give you a clear sense of how you feel about them. Wonder, fear, love. Real life emotions.
But the stuff that's being pumped into Clara's arm? That shouldn't be orange. That's not what I associate with orange.
Chemotherapy. Essentially the poisoning of the body. Used to poison the body and hope to Christ that it kills the cancer before it kills you. Not really sure what smart ass came up with that idea. Whether it was a 3am board meeting decision. Certainly seems like it. However, with a whopping success rate of forty percent, how can we say no? Please note the sarcasm.
Forty percent is barely anything, I know. It's less than half. And that's only for the five year survival rate after getting the leukaemia into remission. But with this new positive energy that I've gotten, and am trying to reinforce, I'm seeing it as a chance. Forty percent chance that Clara will stay with me for the rest of my life. That's more than twenty percent. That's more than ten percent. And it's a whole load more than zero percent. So that's how I've got to look at it.
