meditation in orange
sarah sorensen
In the 3rd grade, Nicole made me gay, a hip cocked, one eye closed to the sun. Something
about her blared at me like a red candy melting in the shimmer of summer. Sometimes, in my
room, I’d wait for my friends to come over while dressed only in my spaghetti strap slip like
Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. My blank body, a feeble trap. I had no plan, but to be
witnessed. Alive! As live as Maggie the Cat. All of my feelings cast out orange sparks like a
licked battery.
See: the movie poster, Taylor posed seductively adrift in flames.
Note: A bed burning to the ground.
See: a girl, a slip with a bow on her heart, a Strawberry Shortcake canopy bed.
...
“Your aura is orange,” says the photographer.
I never told her that it’s the color I dream of under sedation. Once, a pulsating silhouette
of my body, all orange. And once, orbs of orange sliding mellow as a lava lamp.
“It’s a young energy,” she says. Then, without eye contact, “tied to reproduction.”
We stare into the Polaroid like it just made visible all of my secrets.
I take it home and frame it.
...
In the hospital bed, the nurse handed me an orange popsicle as I woke. I took a tentative
bite and threw up all over myself, my bed. A bag of blood drained off my broken leg, white bone
snapped like a candy cigarette. The tumor had caused a crook in the leg that required “resetting.”
What they stole: a cold, gray moon rock. Proof I’m chipped off of something celestial,
delivered to Earth on a comet’s tail. Proof of what goes wrong with a body.
“It’s not cancer,” the doctors told my parents.
“I could see my whole body from above,” I told them. “A neon throbbing outline pulsing
in peach waves.”
The look they gave me, in retrospect, was likely concern.
I told them, but they’ll never feel it, the beauty of it, or the terror.
It’s not cancer. This is what my baby-faced parents heard as they took me home in a
wheelchair with a hopeful set of crutches.
...
“Your aura is orange,” the photographer says. “But there’s red at the edges.”
Like a sunburst. Or a comet. Like the gore of a body, living in its waves and rhythms, a
stranger to itself.
Sarah Sorensen (she/her), MA, MLIS is a queer writer based in the Metro Detroit area. Sarah has been published over 70 times in lit mags, but her most recent work can be found in Soundings East, Jet Fuel Review, and Hare's Paw. Sometimes she daydreams about rescuing every shelter dog in Metro Detroit, but she just has one tiny fireball of barks.