Distraught
Scene: It’s the first day of Spring Quarter, and I’m walking through Price Center. I am unbothered, serene even, as I dodge the usual lunchtime swarm of stressed-out students in search of my final destination. I look up from my phone as I pass by the Burger King, a glimmer of affection and glee in my eye as I meet again with my love, my life, my favorite place in the world: Sunshine Market.
My stomach drops; the glimmer dissipates. The iconic Sunshine Market sign is nowhere to be found.
Instead, a massive, blank square of yellow paint accosts my eyes.
It is a shrill, shrieking yellow, a yellow that will stick to your vision, a yellow that you will inhale thickly into your lungs, a yellow that will induce a high-pitched ringing in your ears. Trust me: this is not the yellow of sunshine. It is disparaging, and sickly, and numbing.
I carry myself robotically across Price Center, almost like there’s a conveyor belt beneath me. Slowly, as if awakening from a dream, I realize that the ringing noise radiating about the room is not only in my ears — there is a horde of screaming students filling and surrounding the establishment.
At the HDH coffee counter, students are crying out in horror at their lukewarm drinks and crumbly boba. A girl crumbles to a heap on the floor upon being told that the market no longer carries its premade smoothies and milkshakes. Inside the store, I am overwhelmed by students gawking and groaning at the hard HDH sushi in the fridges, wailing with fear as they scramble about in search of the international snacks aisle.
I don’t want to admit it to myself but I know — I know — that my beloved Sunshine Market deli sandwiches are nowhere to be found. The wailing around me grows louder and louder, and my legs are bicycling underneath me now in a mad sprint. I all but crash through the automatic Just-Walk-Out gate in the rush of my escape.
“That’s right. Run like the coward you are!” an HDH representative shouts after me, standing at the entrance for the ‘grand opening’ of the labyrinthian market. I can’t bear to turn around, but I can hear him spit on the ground behind me. “Run back to your little Sixth Market and see what better options you have there!”
I slow to a stop at the top of the staircase leading up to Sixth College, panting, hands on my knees. I wipe a bead of sweat — or perhaps it is a tear — from my eye and look out over the half of campus spread out before me.
That is, I try.
A bright — blindingly, painfully bright — yellow light radiates from the Price Center building itself. An intense, burning sensation fills my eyes as I am instantly blinded by the overwhelming presence of that yellow, that screaming, anguish-inducing yellow. Shrieking students pour out of Price Center’s doors, clutching their eyes. I know at this very moment that I will never see again, but in a world without my dear Sunshine Market, I’m not sure if I want to. My only regret is that the last thing I ever saw was that yellow of the new market’s entrance.
