The Tangerine Weeks, or A Festival of Mass Self-Deception

Most of us live for that one week of the year when life seems resettable at the press of a button. Tangerines, fireworks, promises to become better — all of it like the glossy trailer for a film you will never make. We buy new planners to record old mistakes in calligraphic handwriting, and we throw out last year's plans like empty champagne bottles. It is the week when optimists storm the gyms and pessimists storm the office shredders, resolved to wipe the archives of their failures clean.

The New Year is a season of collective trance. We sincerely believe that on the first of January we will find ourselves, cut ties with the toxic, and learn to tell a Cabernet from a Merlot without sneaking a glance at a phone screen under the table. The truth is that we are merely renewing the lease on our old self, refreshing the façade and changing the wallpaper in the hallway.

In that decorated, airless vacuum lived a man named Simeon. The name was biblical, but he was a prophet only in the field of consolation. His life was pure marketing of hope. He sold premium single-origin coffee, courses called Become Yourself in Three Steps, anti-aging creams that promised happiness in a tube. His goods were the same as those New Year tangerines: bright, fragrant, and a week later no one cared about their wrinkled skin.

Simeon was a fugitive trying to outrun time and his own memory. In his heart, like a weed, a childhood story had taken root — one everyone else had long forgotten, but to which he had given deep, painful purchase.

He was twelve. The scene, banal to the point of ringing in the ears: a girl from their group slipped on the icy school steps and twisted her ankle. Simeon stood in the crowd of friends and did not dare step forward. In the cruel world of adolescents, sentimentality was social death. So instead of offering his hand, he laughed louder than the rest, drowning out the sudden, sharp prick of conscience.

The second their eyes met he would never forget. In the girl's dilated pupils there was not so much pain as a silent question: why are you over there, and not here? Simeon turned away quickly, but the still frame burned itself into his retina forever. From that day on he became a shadow walking always half a step ahead of himself.

Simeon ran. From the aching emptiness inside, from any inconvenient question. Tobacco, expensive alcohol, easy victories and heavy hangovers became his only support. Like everyone, he dreamed of greatness and did vanishingly little.

– Life is just an endless succession of Mondays, – he would mutter to his reflection in the mirrors of bars.

At the height of the pre-holiday hysteria, Simeon felt the foundation of his private deception crack. The answers did not surface at the bottom of the glass, did not hide behind the charts of his ad dashboard. After thirty-three, the Christ-age, time had turned into a soundless centrifuge: each rotation shorter, the hum in his ears clearer.

One Christmas Eve, Simeon stood on a street corner, drawing on a bitter cigarette, watching the smoke dissolve into the frozen air. And then a thought reached him, stripped of any grandeur: what if life does not need a major renovation? All those attempts to patch reality and rewrite the script — vanity, in the face of eternity. Life is sufficient in its imperfection.

The city was pulsing in a pre-holiday arrhythmia: yoga mats and heavy bags drifted past him, stuffed with hopes for a miracle. The rhythm broke sharply. A woman a few metres away lost her balance. Gravity was merciless: the paper bag burst with a dry pop, and tangerines, like bright orange billiard balls, scattered across the dirty grey snow.

Simeon moved before he thought — a motion dictated by decades of suppressed shame. As he helped the woman up, he felt the invisible noose around his neck, the one tightened on those school steps long ago, finally loosen. The sharp, piercing scent of crushed citrus peel hit him — the real smell of the moment.

The stranger's embarrassed smile answered with a forgotten warmth in his chest. In that instant the ghost of the girl from the past finally looked away.

All this time, Simeon had been stealing from himself — depriving himself of the right to be simply a person, one allowed to make a mistake and to set it right.

Chance always uncovers the truth: life is not obliged to be perfect. It is like Christmas snow — it melts, leaving only a barely visible trace on the cheek, and a reminder: everything that matters is always closer than it seems.