this imploding heart

I don't care what you told me, you're gonna come and hold me

You just said it. I heard you say it. I think you...

I'm just standing here. Holding these oranges. One in each hand, elbows bent against my sides as though I'm about to juggle.
I'm not about to juggle.
I don't know anything about juggling.

You looked up from the piles of onions directly across from me and said it like you're asking if we need milk, you then return to squeezing bits of dried onion peel off onions you don't intend on buying.
I stand there, an orange in each hand like a new, orange-holding, 2 armed semi-goddess of 2003. Mouth slightly open, staring at you as if you'd just asked me to take a bite out of my own hand. I don't know very much about biting my own hands.

There's this certain asthetic to the produce section. It's as if the fruits and vegetables are a part of a really pleasant funeral, displaying their bodies as-is for the last time. They breathe out in submission when I grasp and squeeze and smell and drop into my basket. I was just enjoying this funeral. I was enjoying the corn being in the husk and you shoving your hands in the pockets of your hoodie with only the bottom being zipped up. I like it when you stand by the bunches of spinach and shake the moisture off. I like to smell the back of your neck in conjunction with that wet fertilized dirt smell that comes when you shake the water off spinach. I like carrying watermelons like they're my melon babies. This is just not the time and place.

You look back up from the onions at me, expectantly. I have since set the oranges in our basket with no plastic bag and I want to put kumquats in my ears like little citrus earplugs.

You arch your eyebrows. I furrow mine.

I shake a cucumber at you like an old man with an umbrella. "Don't you say things like that to me. You go say that to some other girl."

"How about I say it to the apples?"

"Don't you talk to my produce."

You circle around the sweet potatoes with an ear of corn in one hand. You put the other hand flat on my stomach, well away from my bellybutton, and pull me toward you.
"Not going to work, trogdor." I say.

but it gets me every time.

"peaches sliced in a bowl. Mixed color corn dropped in boiling water for just one minute and served without butter or salt. Spinach steamed and served with lentils. Pearl onions minced into goulash. Braeburn apples waiting in your backpack. "

"Damn you."

"organic red plums."

"piss off."

"bananas with a tiny tiny bit of green at the top."

I turn and put my mouth up against the underside of your chin, so that when I say it, it rattles around in your brain. "........so maybe I might love you too. so there."

Posted by Sonya at August 14, 2003 08:42 AM