on goodbyes and orange peels

goodbye said an orange floating through the incandescent water, goodbye dear stranger. thank you for blessing my skin with stars. you will never know how much it means to me. she thrust and floated through uncertain waters, steadfast as an angel folding the clouds over its wings. but the memory of those faces, the smiles and glaring gazes, marks an orange peel like stars burn a sky. striving for connectedness we can shoot for these stars and even reach them, but embarking on these intergalactic quests we lose focus on the oranges, forget that we ourselves were the fruit of life at one point. this is the journey of maturity, of growth in the 20th century. in our city, lives are punctuated by goodbyes and our connections are held over a line, as if at gunpoint. how do we learn to deal with it? find solace in the physical world or unpack our phones from our pockets waiting for their text message? if we only used our phones to talk to the people we care for, wouldn’t screen time and humanity be interchangeable in conversation? because of the uncertainty we live with, we hover endlessly alone but never more connected. mightn’t we take it day by day and smile at the orange peels as they travel, and put ourselves in the shoes of a ripple in a wave?