I was raised in a town the size of a thimble,
surrounded by small dreams and big freedoms,
and the nation's finest apple orchards.
But even the best apples taste rotten to me,
rotten to the seedy core.
Cores outnumber beating hearts 10,000 to 1 there
and I didn't like those odds,
or those apples,
so I left.
. . .
I didn't bite another apple till years later
when a beating heart grew inside me,
Grew, but did not survive, like many of the fruit
I remember from the orchards of my youth.
After the sweet budling gave herself back to the earth,
eventually the rot-cravings stilled,
and I never wanted to taste another again.
They taste rotten to me, you see,
rotten to my core.
. . .
But then years later, I went to prison
and lived in a room smaller than a knot on a thimble,
where nothing grows, least of all people.
There, they fed us an apple a day,
which might have been their seedy justification
for keeping the doctors away.
I didn't like those apples either so I didn't eat
till the hunger became so powerful it disappeared
and all I felt was bone-weary weakness.
. . .
It was a 60-year-old street hooker
who finally convinced me to eat one,
reminding me: the air is often rotten,
and the system is always rotten, but
we still have to breathe. To survive.
Eat the rot or be the rot, she said,
and I listened.
I ate. I ate while I prayed
that the rot wouldn't get my core.
. . .
So my heart keeps beating.
The beats outnumbering lost dreams and freedoms,
10,000 to 1.
I like my odds.
And I like the apples I bite into in freedom
because they taste rotten.
And some days that's the only way I know
that any part of me
survived.
________________________________________
Another for the book of ugly, but this one was written for the Daily Post's weekly writing challenges. This week is SNAPSHOT, painting a broad story using a series of short, focused strokes. How'd I do?
How do you like your apples?
