Sour Oranges

Sour Oranges

On Carnaby Street, they sell oranges. It is a trek to get there - there are no roads or paths from the house to it. You have to walk through the grass, full of stinging nettles, bees and thorns. It does hurt a lot, sometimes, but those oranges are worth it.

They are the best oranges, with a taste more overpowering than anything you could imagine. They are sour - the type of sour that feels like thousands of pin pricks on your tongue, or acid slipping gently down your throat. They are addictive.

They are surprisingly cheap too - not many other people seem to appreciate the special quality of those oranges. But then again, other people do drugs. It is so stupid of them, really. The damage a few sour oranges can do is nothing compared to drugs that play havoc with your mind and perceptions.

But...in some ways...these oranges do that too. Knowing that only you could eat so many of those sour oranges, one after another, is empowering. It makes you feel like you can do anything - you can forget those memories that haunt you second after second. You can't. It makes you feel like you are better than others - more powerful. Maybe even powerful enough to change what they think of you. You can't. It makes you feel like you could get over the pain - that maybe by eating oranges that feels like torture, you could get over your own blonde personal torture that stabs you in the heart, every minute of every hour of every day. But you can't.

You know you can't get over the pain because you are not strong. You know you can't get over the pain because those memories come back to haunt you every second. You know you can't get over the pain, because you know you don't deserve to.

You deserve every pain that life could throw at you, every insult that is flung at you, and most of all, you deserve this hell that you've created for yourself. You don't even deserve these oranges, to escape from what you know you have no one else to blame but yourself.

But for those few seconds, when you eat those sour oranges, you feel like maybe all of this isn't true. So maybe those oranges are the drugs you refuse to do, the masochistic pain you inflict on yourself, using oranges instead of knives. But the addiction is the same, and so is the way you are hurting yourself.

So you trek, day after day, sometimes more than once a day. You walk through grass full of stinging nettles, bees and thorns, getting stung by nettles and bees, and getting scratched by thorns, along the way. And you don't register it for more than a second, maybe. Because those oranges are calling, and you are craving the delusions that they produce.

You reach the stall, whose owner is probably living on all the money you spend on those oranges. You buy them, and you trek all the way back, getting stung and scratched all over again. And you don't notice it for more than a second now, either, because you have the oranges now. It is already giving you that sense of power - the imaginary power that stops you from killing yourself. And in times of particular honesty, you wonder what you would do if those oranges stopped being sold. And it frightens you, because you know just what you would do, even if you don't deserve such an easy path out of this hell. And you thank every god you can think of, for Carnaby Street and the oranges they sell, because in those few honest moments, you know that they are the only things keeping you alive. Because memories of Draco sure aren't .