The Peeling Process
Anyone who tells you that sobriety is easy is either delusional or they’re selling you something. Meeting with a sponsor is tolerable, going to the meetings is… alright, if you’re into the whole God thing. But you know there’s something missing, a rush of dopamine suddenly gone. When you quit, everyone you know tells you that you’ll finally start being yourself again, that you’re finally free from the prison you built around yourself. But at night, when you lay awake in your third-hand twin bed, the thought creeps up that there is no “yourself” without your addiction.
You first read about it in some online forum. “Eating an orange in the shower is the most enlightening experience you can have in our modern age.” There’s a whole subculture around it, people sharing the euphoria of ripping into tangerines while standing under a steady current of warm water.
It’s something that you disregard, at first. How can a shower orange fill the void left behind in sobriety’s wake? But your neighbor pisses you off one too many times and his orange tree stands snug up against your shared fence, so you prop yourself up on the backer rail and grab some citrus for later. Even if it’s not the elevated experience people preach about online, at least you’ll get a quick rush from petty thievery.
Your roommate leaves on a weekend trip with their significant other and you get your chance then. It’s damn near impossible to get more than five minutes of privacy in the bathroom with them home, and you haven’t sat in the shower since your last big spiral. The water warms, pipes creaking to accommodate the heat, and you roll three large oranges into the shower. You sink to the ground, feeling the water drag its way through your hair, in your face, down your body, and sag against the linoleum. The smell envelops you, riding the steam and traveling throughout the bathroom. You dig your thumbnail in, feeling the anticipation well up inside you. A tightness in your throat, subsiding when you break the skin of the fruit.
The suggestions of those who had come before you flood your mind. “Just tear into that sweet sweet citrus like you’re a vampire trying to get one last meal in before the sun rises.” You split the orange, uneven halves cradled in each palm, and finally dig into the flesh.
As the juice trickles down your throat, you feel alive again. Even as you rip the orange apart, raising cupped hands to your lips like a Communion Goblet, all stickiness is washed away with the rest of your sin as the water blankets your body. You don’t know how long you’ve spent in the shower with your holy oranges, but it is only when the water runs cold that you finally return to yourself.
Needless to say, this is your new thing now. Where you used to utilize your past addictions to fill the emptiness inside you, you turn now to another vice. Just you, your shower, and a truly buckwild amount of oranges. You feel correct now, like there’s a way to become yourself again. You’re full of energy, you perform well at work and actually tidy up after yourself.
The house has never looked so clean.
It’s when you’re washing the dishes that your roommate comes home, lugging their suitcase behind them. You say your pleasantries, they praise your hard work on the house, and stumble down the hall.
“Hey man,” they poke their head through the bathroom door, “why are there so many orange peels in the shower?”
M. Risley is a fiction writer specializing in flash fiction and short stories. They are set to graduate from the University of Colorado, Denver, with a major in creative writing and a minor in linguistics, in December of 2022.