everything else: a tiny letter about orange juice
dear internet,
some days i wake up and i’m like, here’s what i think the people need to hear from me today, and today that thing is the concept of orange juice. i love orange juice. love it in a tetrapak or a mason jar or freshly-squeezed and overpriced at a café, generally ordered to offset the sweetness of my waffles. i feel about orange juice the way people in fiction seem to feel about milk: it is something inexpressibly comforting and familiar, associated simultaneously, somehow, with childhood and adolescent summer days and my room-of-one’s-own twentysomething existence, although i did not in fact drink a lot of orange juice in my childhood or adolescence. my favourite orange juices are the kind that look blandly opaque in a glass, a flat nothing colour that’s darker than pastel but not bright by any means, nothing like the colour of an actual orange.
this album by tennis feels like orange juice. so does some lorde. the only taylor swift albums that pass the orange juice vibe check are 1989 and lover. swimming feels like orange juice, but only in a pool that tastes like chlorine. fancy pools or other forms of swimming, such as at the beach, are not orange juice activites. tennis, which i do not play, is an orange juice sport. intercity trains feel like orange juice but never the subway. orange juice books: meg cabot, luster by raven leilani but only if you read it all in one sitting. orange juice experiences: a pre-noon showing of a movie at a cinema where the audience contains a maximum of fifteen other people; walking through a mall on an empty stomach; heat exhaustion when you’re trying to leave a park and go home but you’re still hundreds of meters from the exit and the only way out is through.
orange ice lollies are not orange juice, but the ice cream my sister and i ate in china, which was called orange balls and consisted of little balls of frozen orange juice and was perfect, delicious, and we continue to think about a full decade later? that’s what every orange juice aspires to be.
the best orange juice in india is from raw pressery. it costs an absolutely bananas amount of money, is absolutely worth it, and constitutes a clear 50% of our grocery purchases over the last nine months. sometimes i dilute it with soda. sometimes i alternate between sips of orange juice and sips of coffee. sometimes i wish i had a straw so that i could drink it lying down. at all times when i am not drinking orange juice i am thinking about orange juice, like that letter alex turner wrote to alexa chung that everyone who was ever on tumblr has memorized so i don’t have to link it, but it’s ‘my brain hasn’t shut up about orange juice since i drank it’. this has been exactly five hundred words about orange juice.
love,
t