Watermelon

“Don’t say I said but...”

Bah! No, stop. Just...

I wish for the capacity to dispel the impending words from your mouth as easily as I just waved them from the air in my mind’s eye. Anything preceded by that statement means you shouldn’t be saying, I shouldn’t be hearing, and it’s highly unlikely there’s a good reason for any of this

But I’ve learned...techniques...for disengaging, so...

Something I can hear.

My ears, squealing. They always squeal, but now I abandon denial and tune into the sound. A growing crescendo of high pitched electricky tones, cutting through and over everything. I pull them deeper into me and I resonate, feeling their thrum mingle with my thrum as my heart pumps and blood rushes audibly in counterpoint. I centre myself in this symphony of my body’s being.

Something I can see.

Aside from the molten iron orb, arcing high.

It’s merciless heat burns the very air, I gather it’s shimmer to me too. Mantling myself in it’s flicker as I avert my gaze, and search for something else to look upon. As much as I sometimes wish I was not seeing, I feel no pressing desire to be blinded.

What else can I see?

A white flash tipped with a golden spear crosses the far off gradient between the low down hazy blueish of the sea and the high up hazy blueish of the sky, soaring against it. Opened out, spreading from tremulous tip to tremulous tip the bird hangs in the air, unabashed in it’s defiance of gravity.

I know it’s aerodynamics.

I recall those diagrams. Held within the pages of the grubby, much used, much ‘annotated’ workbooks of the science room. Where we took in teachings along with the smell of hot dry wood and warm socks. Gathering in the patches of shade between the light slicing savagely round the gaps in the blinds by a similarly hot sun, we huddled around the books. Knowledge, once mysterious to us, now rendered in a black-inked illustration of a cross section of a wing. Direction of air flow and resistance indicated by restrained arrows, effects noted in italics. Contriving to explain the magic of flight and managing only the mechanics. Sadly bounded within small neat boxes, and those penned in by columns of serif-font text.

The bird doesn’t know any of that. The bird flies on faith that it will not fail to defy the call of the hard earth below. That it will not fall to smash into it. That it’s plumage will not scatter in concentric rings. That it won’t be blown from it’s broken body.

I shelter behind the separation I have sculpted myself with these things. And half watch the moving mouth that fumbles it’s forbidden fruit.

I know the routine. I watch as they tease the fruit between their teeth, rolling it around their mouth until they have the perfect placement and the perfect hold.

Yes, now comes the slow squeeze that takes pleasure in the delay of gratification, anticipating the moment the soft skin finally splits, and spills, and secrets run in a ruin of juice and flesh over the chin of the avid face that feasts on such flesh.

I observe, through my remove, the answering avarice in the listeners. Watch as they scoop up the falling ruined scraps in their hunger for a taste of the verboten, more mouths sucking the juice from their fingers as they clamour like flightless baby birds for more.

I’m imagining it as a cherry tomato, although watermelon mush feels more fitting.

Always disappointing watermelon, no matter what you try with it.

You know the deal, it’s not that juicy, not that refreshing, not that flavourful, and bits of seed husk stick in your teeth and abscess if you don’t pick them out first. And yet still it somehow manages to convincingly promise more than it delivers on and has a place at almost every party. Maybe it’s the Dirty Dancing thing. The idea that watermelon is somehow fun has been with us a long time, it’s hard to let go of.

I don’t know why I kept falling for it. I’m not now, not this time.

This time I’ve remembered about watermelon, and I’m standing slightly apart from the table it graces, just watching the wasps courting the mush.