Peaches

I still think about the days I spent wishing I were a peach.

It was halfway through the merciless winter and I had become gluttonous on homemade berry compote, always craving the taste of sweet fruit. Everything was grey and sad, and to adjust I developed yin-yang habits. I would mentally catalogue every flash of glitter or brush of hue that ever moved me, day to day, along with a list of harmful associations. I looked for myself in clinging, putrid smoke; dried, crumpled leaves; the slow, sad drip of a punctured pipe; discarded, broken, shit-brown beer bottles—but even shit-brown glass can catch a sparkle and give a glimmer of its former sacredness. I saw myself in the grey gravel particles that stuck in the grooves of the soles of my shoes and scraped against each surface I dared to step on.

I have always paid close attention to the shape and colour of things. Appearance is a shortcut to the essence (is it really? I don’t think I care, but I’ve always thought so). Perhaps this dissolution of significance is what made it so easy to force meaning onto everything around me. I first began to envy the warm vibrancy of a peach. Then, after being shocked to see in the mirror how much I had wasted away in a few months, I had longed for my body to possess the rounded, taut, smoothness of a peach.

And its taste.

Ah, its taste. The tang that sticks to your mouth.

I want to linger there too. Slick with stickiness, lips flared and teeth bare at the sight of me, the thought of lips brushing against soft flesh, and the flood of juices as you bite decisively.  Initially I wanted to be delicate and tempting like a raspberry or a strawberry. I also prefer the sensuousness of a berry. I quickly realised that berries are too delicate—they are enjoyed quickly, easily. I thought of myself every time I put a raspberry between my fingers and crushed it. In shops, I would pick peaches ups and place them in my palm, rubbing the fingertips of my other hand over the supple skin. I would do this to my own in the shower and feel nothing. When I looked at a peach, I thought I had never come close to that sweet purity, not even as a child. But I did not know how to make people see me as I wanted to be seen. I don’t mean that I thought that dressing in warm orange and fuchsia would make people want me. This was not an exercise in costume or portrayal. The shortcut would have to be subtler and more visceral. This was the looming torment at the time.

A thought came into my head at some point: if there was a survey conducted on the most loved fruit, would a peach win? This became a fixation. What else is there to want? I thought about asking people. The only answers I would have really been interested in hearing would have been from men, but this fact was kept behind a door in my mind I pretended I never had the key to. I never had the courage to ask, but I would try to guess. I wanted to know what was desired of me. Another question: would it matter if a peach were rotting on the inside, but still mostly inviting externally? This, it turns out, was really the most crucial aspect. The only answer I could eventually settle on was that it depended on the purpose of the peach—was it there to be eaten or looked at? One would have to be quite starved of sweetness and nourishment to continue eating that peach once they knew. If one were only looking, touching, and maybe stealing a few small pecks, it would not matter. If the fruit itself is the only witness, it can save face if everyone were kept at a distance from it.

I came across a gardening book that initially charmed me, but turned me unexpectedly solemn when the writer made this declaration:

The medlar is not a fruit I care for. By the time it is ready to eat, it bears far too close a resemblance to a rotting or ‘bletted’ pear. It can, however, be made into a preserve, and the little tree certainly has a definite value, for in a favourable autumn the leaves turn to a motley of a very beautiful variegated colours—pink, yellow, green, and brown, freckled with russet fruits.

I considered this for days. I measured these mixed evocations against those provided in the following paragraph of the cherry-plum, the fruit with “every virtue.” It was difficult to judge whether I was the kind of person who values “supreme beauty,” rather than the “knotted complexity” of a medlar, because it was difficult to remember whether I was a person at all. 

I became convinced that the abilities of my taste buds were fading. I thought my eyes had lost saturation and that colours were draining. Eventually I could no longer see the warmth in peaches. Their flavour was subdued and the limits of their feel and taste became apparent. I couldn’t see anything in anything anymore. There was a slow sap of texture, colour, taste, feeling. One day as I was looking at the peach-hued sky, I was sucked into a black, swirling hole that appeared gaping to me. Then I was spat back out.

Now I think it is a sin to want something so unremarkable.