by Sydney Garrett, staff reporter
“Wait, wait.” I am incredulous. “Do you see that?”
A soft, faded light takes hold of my attention, grabs me, shakes me, like an angler fish.
“It’s so…pink,” I say.
I shake my friend and point towards the ancient street lamp catty-corner to my front door. The light is perched perilously on the space between manicured grass and concrete curb.
It’s emanating light. Not just any regular, run-of-the-mill white light though. This is stereotypic-baby-girl pink. This is bubblegum-punk-hair pink. This is brighter-than-a-flamingo pink. This is amazing.
***
This pink light that so captured my attention has been growing progressively more exuberant over the years.
I’ve tried to capture the color in photos, encapsulate the hue in words, but with little success. This crazy, tiny street lamp is beyond description, beyond capture, and I’ve really come to like it.
Every time I come home after work, or from school, or anywhere else, exhausted to the point of delirium or just hungry or whatever else, I see this pink light, shining with little regard for the norm of street lamps, and I am filled with excitement, because, look at my extra special pink light that is unique to me and my house and my neighborhood alone.
It’s unbelievable, right, that I have some ridiculous bond with some ridiculous, flamboyant pink light outside of my window. It’s unimaginable that I should ever care so much about an arguably adorable street lamp.
But even more so, it’s unthinkable that the ever-cursed “management” would change out the light bulb in my street lamp because someone, somewhere, thought that it was too old and therefore had outgrown its purposes.
But they did. They updated my pretty pink light.
It’s no longer pink. It’s no longer faded in the same way that an old picture is. It’s clinical and bright now. It’s everything that I had become unaccustomed to when looking out of my window.
The new, bright, horrible light shocks me every time I see it. I legitimately miss that soft, pink glow that greeted me every morning as I dragged myself out of bed to go for a run.
I miss ecstatically pointing out to everyone I knew how cute and perfect and unique my little street lamp was. I became attached to this inanimate object, but that didn’t change the fact that it wouldn’t, or couldn’t, just stay, even for me.
I am a senior now, almost eighteen, almost legally an adult, almost moving out of my home, almost incapable of calling College Station my place of residence. When I move away, as I am oft to do, everything here in College Station will keep moving.
Lights will be replaced. Rooms will be tidied. More kiddos will become seniors, will become adults, will become graduates, will replace the memories of us.
I might come back after being away and find that all of the faintly pink light bulbs in my neighborhood have been replaced with new ones, with “better” ones. That even if things become more beautiful as they age, they can’t be saved from the constant desire to improve, to renovate.
My pretty pink light was devoured by this desire.
