How to Find Beauty in the Morning After

How to Find Beauty in the Morning After

There are two kinds of morning-after realizations. The first is waking up to a pounding headache, the lingering stench of last night’s cigarettes, and the vague yet persistent fear that you might have revealed a friend’s deep  — more on that in the next article — secret. The second is waking up and realizing you’ve been wrong about something your entire life.
 

For me, it was clementines.
 

As a kid, clementines weren’t a treat; they were a chore. A fruit my parents would hand me at Christmas while launching into the speech—how, back in their day, a single clementine was the ultimate Christmas present — turns out it’s just a bloody lie, a classic French country side myth — Meanwhile, I was sitting there, TV remote control in one hand, forced nostalgia in the other, pretending to care. The clementine became a symbol of you don’t know how good you have it, of forced gratitude, of childhood guilt wrapped in citrusy disappointment. So naturally, I hated them.
 

And then, 22 years later, something shifted.
 

A friend casually offered me a slice of their clementine, and without thinking, I said yes. The second before I bit into it, I braced myself for that awful texture—those little pieces of skin sticking to my tongue, the sensation of eating freshly cut grass. But then—pure, juicy, citrusy perfection.

Suddenly, I wasn’t chewing on childhood resentment; I was tasting something good. Like, really good. It was sweet and bright and somehow exactly what I needed.
Now, I’m officially obsessed. I stock up on clementines like they’re an essential vice, right next to coffee and cigarettes. When the season started this year, it felt like finally reuniting with that long-awaited, never-arrived love.
 

In the end its about seeing the glass half full.
If there’s a glass half full moment, there’s also a glass half empty lurking nearby. The realization that maybe I’ve missed out on 22 years of perfectly good clementines. That maybe—just maybe—there are other things I’ve written off too soon, other flavors of life I’ve refused to taste out of sheer stubbornness. What else have I been wrong about? What other joys have I denied myself for no reason at all? Maybe I’d actually prefer a proper milk tea over my usual pitch-black coffee?
 

Once you open that door, you start questioning everything. The foods you hate, the people you avoid. What if the thing you’re so sure about is just waiting for the right moment to prove you wrong?
 

As I stand here, peeling another clementine, I realize how easy it is to reject things you don’t fully understand. Turns out, rediscovering something is sometimes better than discovering it in the first place.
 

The real question is—what else have I been missing?

 

xx
 

Louis 

the one that I just ate