Apricots | Teen Ink

Apricots

August 9, 2021
By Giuliawrites GOLD, Muscat, Other
Giuliawrites GOLD, Muscat, Other
14 articles 0 photos 17 comments

Favorite Quote:
»"Everything that happens, you write it," he said.
"Everything I write happens" was the answer. »
The Neverending story,
Michael Ende


Sunsets decorate the roman skyline.

Untouchable feeling, but I can almost touch the seagull flying over me. 

This kind of blue is built different, polluted by italian cars and italian smokers, unaware they're just a summer reality.

Who even taught me to find ambulance sirens so romantic?

Signs of Childhood hidden everywhere, like easy-to-find easter eggs.

Old bookshelves full of summer books, smelling of sand and salt, roughened by the seawater and wind. Crumpled, yellowed, swollen pages of Spanish and English romantic literature. Often decorated by handwritten comments on the margins and traces of chocolate, they breathe dust of hope to survive.

Tanned skin painted pink by drops of raspeberry sorbet. Blessed summer. Traces of love on my skin in the form of sunburns in curious places.

Hard skin under my feet from burning sand, burning desire for ice cream burning lust for you, washed down by cheap cocunut water from beach vendors, fifty cents a piece.

I saw you on the metro, romantic roman metro. Reeking of lustfull lifeful sweat, cheap sunscreen and hints of tobacco. Torpid air, I stick my nose out the small graffitti-covered metro window. I saw you as I pulled my hair up in a bun from the heat. Holding the sticky silver pole in one hand and the burgundy-hard-cover book in the other, the book with the red and green ink. Dressed down in a t-shirt, old jeans and nearly torn apart backpack, I looked for Ende in you and couldn't find it.

So pleasurably surprised by something I couldn't understand.

I wanted to get closer, but I wasn't dressed like Ende either and I didn't have proof of my existence unlike you. So I did nothing.

Apricots and figs in the hot summer air. Apricot juice trickling down my arm. Shy glossy drops now traveling down to my thigh. I have chills. I tear the fruit apart with my thumbs, quickly brought to my mouth I suck the juices out. Elixir of life. Shameless desire. Lick my sticky fingers I cut the fig in half, yet the fruit is so ripe it melts before me. Devour the sweet addicitive taste. How can apricots and figs be so pure and yet so passionately lewd. 

I wear bright yellow, on my skin and in my hair. Your eyes are bright green. We are apricots and figs from the orchard. 

What better place to fall in love? How can I speak of love? Never has it yet knocked on my door? Yet I use the word so liberally. Or perhaps it is because I have yet to taste it that I throw the word at whoever is willing to catch it. Making it not a longed- for wish like summer from winter desks. But a weigthless, powerless sequence of letters. Diminish its sanctity, stripped naked of its meaning. 

Yet it is all anyone wishes for me to accomplish in life, to find love. Can a woman aspire to more, if not to seduce? All the while they believe I do not deserve love yet. After all, I pray only at convenience, and seldom at that, asking for " whichever God is available", not to seem demanding. I bear the weight on my shoulders like tight bra straps razor-cutting my skin.

I only feel lonely not independent.

I only feel lust not love.

But if love is all I get, than I shall find love in everything. Love in the act of writing and lust in the taste of apricots and figs.


The author's comments:

story set in Rome, Italy. Read while listening to Mystery of love from Call Me By Your Name. When I say "Ende" I mean Micheal Ende writer of the Neverending Story aka the burgundy book with the green and red ink. love u all.


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