A Bitter Reality

Rotting strawberries taste better than no strawberries at all.  Still enough sweetness to hip you to what they once was.  Vague memories of a vibrant life in its prime.  Each bite, a hopeful attempt at a remaining vestige.

The trick is knowing when to pick ‘em.  Well, you probably buying ‘em from a store, so the trick is knowing just how ripe they need to be to enjoy ‘em in time.  This requires you accurately judging how quickly you gonna eat them thangs.  If you intend to murk them suckas on the ride home, for example, pick the ones dark like a Sudanese sister’s shoulders.   If it’s just a quick snack every few days, you might wanna go with the paler variety.  The simple things make the biggest difference.

But right.  You don’t know the future.  Things may not play out as you intend.  You get a phone call on your way home, for instance.  All of the sudden, you deaf to them juicy berries all moist and shiny and sultry, summoning you from the shopping bag.  When you finally get around to ‘em, they not what they once was…kinda like finally meeting Pam Grier and having to come to grips with the fact that she’s no longer Foxy Brown….damn!

So a bowl of cereal, topped with bananas and your leading lady: Strawberry.  You know she not as…luscious as when you encountered her in the produce section, lookin all ripe.  And you, playing coy, tryin not to stare and that voluptuous plumpness, scarlet like nobody’s business, ooo!  But you had to compose yourself and say something.

“Excuse me” eyebrows bouncing up and down like a chulo’s Buick. “i couldn’t help but noticing that…your seeds are showing”

And she’s yours! Riding shotgun in your shopping cart…oh it’s on and poppin!

Now it’s nearing midnight on a weekday, and you, grown, munchin on some cereal like the kid you’d love to be again, filled with the ill nostalgia as you nibble on the spoiling body of your Sweet.  Everything else is gone.  It’s just you and Strawberry, backstroking in a bowl of tinted almond milk.  Momma always told you not to play with your food.  But you not thinkin ‘bout Momma right now.  You remembering the good times.  Eyes meeting through the pineapple leaves hating like overzealous defenders. A fairytale intro to a supermarket tryst for the history books.

And here ya’ll are.  Together.  You know this is it.  You know this is goodbye.  A reality too bitter to swallow, so you hold on to each passing second as if your obstinate patience could somehow alter the natural order of things.  But as you watch your baby drowning in that milk, you realize the time has come, that your time together will always be your time together and no one can take that from you.  Just that it will never again be what it was–an understanding that don’t ease no pain.  So you deny it even now, in the twilight of your affair, and comfort yourself by insisting:

Rotting strawberries taste better than no strawberries at all.

-amari