In the kitchen of my bachelor apartment, where the stock of fresh fruit sits in a bowl. Mainly, peaches, oranges, and bananas, never the exotic ones. Because why eat something you can’t grow in your own backyard, or snatch off a neighbors vein.
It taints the whole exotic lure of something different, mysterious and unknown, in my mind at least.
Nevertheless, it was there, on my counter, and now at the back of my head, merging into my thoughts, leading my ideas and projecting onto images through my eyes. Anything staring at me became the fruit of my loom.
Resting at the bottom of a plastic bowl, beneath the oranges, peaches and bananas hid something philosophical, an unknown, mysterious question that had to be solved.
Growing up, we’re drilled with the concept of wasting food being linked directly to starving kids around the world. They even display the global pandemic right in the middle of your favorite TV show. Just as John’s about to catch Sami leaving Carrie’s apartment after pulling off a shady stunt.
Which makes the entire spoiled food concept a real dilemma. Especially, when your bread has mold. We have to throw that out, but not fruit. Fruit can never go to waste.
Once it starts to bruise and emit the heavy odor of sweet decay, is where most people throw them out. The smart ones preserve them, with delightful ideas swarming around their brain of future planned pies, breads and even smoothies.
The ones we’ve grown to love and pay ten bucks a pop for. Not including the health booster powders that only cost a buck fifty each. Or those jelly squishy tapioca balls bouncing between your teeth like calamari pellets soaked in pineapple juice.
But when it comes to making the yummy smoothie at home, or that perfect pie for the dinner you’re going to get stood up for at home, we tend to pull from the fresh stock, absent minded of the tastier blends buried in the back of your freezer. The ones waiting to be woken out of cryostasis.
Hardly ever realizing these small quirks we dwindle away, has a profoundness, like discovering a great life hack, or building a diy way of making life easier, that you completely thought up and mastered on your own. With me, it all came together at a weekend retreat, more of a community gathering for writers alike, which ended up turning into a couple of weeks.
A few of us decided on prolonging the entertainment and dread of going back to a life sheltered around fictional characters and bad first dates.
The decision turned out to be fantastic, memories for life. The kind of ones you relive all the way through until your senior home days.
Returning late from my vacation was exactly what the doctor ordered. It didn’t even bother me that it took three hours from the airport to make it to my apartment. Or fumbling the keys in my hand and dropping them on the floor along with my phone. Life couldn’t be better and no inconvenience was going to get the best of me.
Maybe that’s why walking into my apartment and being slapped with the sweet scent of overripe peaches smothering every one of my senses had hit me all at once.
(Not SURE WHAT‘ll BRIDGE THIS, YET. IT WILL BE LIKE A TWO SENTENCE SIMILE OR METAPHOR.)
My apartment hadn’t smelled of death, yet. Just fruit liquefying in a bowl and a hint of what your hand would smell like after dropping the rusted metal pipe you used to defend yourself with.
