Mangos are Immortal

That summer tasted like mangos.

The summer that I discovered Kate Bush, the summer I started smoking pot and having good sex and wearing sunscreen. That summer my neighbours mango tree blossomed so heavily that the bows slumped, pregnant over our green tin fence.

How could I not pick them?

That was the summer that I wore white rimmed sunglasses and bandanas and cooked with zucchini. I spent most of my time on the red deck of my rental in the rainforest, lounging on the green couch that I had lugged home from the side of the road. I would sit out there with friends, or at times nobody;

but the band five or six cockatoos, who sat on the bird bath, were constant witnesses to my unravelling.

One particular day comes to mind, one when the sun was especially ripe and the basket next to me was full to the brim with yellow. That tree never stopped giving, the mangos pouring and she, a burdened life-giver, a horrifically feminine fountain of youth. She just gave, and gave, and bled and bled. And if you didn’t pick them in time, they would fall to the Earth and rot. What a waste.

So why not pick them?

That afternoon, under the ripe sun I was sitting on the green street-thrifted couch, and as I bit into that mango,

I appreciated how lush it felt on the tongue.

It was unlike the tongue of a boy or a girl or like anything that I had ever licked before. I had been kissing many boys that summer, on the journey of discovering my ‘sensual being’. But the mango and its sweet skin made me realise that humans do not sit so well on the tongue, but mangos do.

I thought of that poem that had traumatised me in high school, it was called ‘Mango’,

by Ellen van Neerven. She had obscure ideas about the deceiving fruit,

and about sexuality

and about youth.

That summer was red and green and Wuthering Heights was the psalm on repeat. I did not listen to that song, I lived to it. It was my favourite song to read Ted Hughes to, Birthday Letters, and to smoke damiana joints to and to eat zucchini dinners to. I thought it was about how love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation, but that is just my interpretation. (I'm only telling you about the song because I think it is relevant to have an anthem to all of your eras.)

That summer was sticky, with sweat, spilt beer and gum and drying mango juice. For brief moments that summer when I was high,

like that time on the deck sitting on the green couch,

with my legs crossed and my toenails painted blue,

the thought of living the rest of my life as a human both comforted and terrified me. I always thought that I had my shit together.

But as I sat and ate that mango I realised that I was light-years away from understanding what life is, and why it means, and what kind of swagger I would need to get through it. It was my ‘move the fruit from the bowl and you will see the rot’, moment. I was dumbfounded to the glorifying realisation that I, and my life, was small and insignificant to the immeasurable greatness of the

universe.

That was the summer I realised that my cat could be Jesus.

And if that was true why did it ever matter? I think I stopped reading my Bible that summer. Nature took over theology and God became archaic in my book. But in the same vein I became obsessed with religious iconography… L’Angélus, Cristo crocifisso, L'ultima Cena…

That summer I realised that I was dying. Not from any illness, nothing renal, nothing pulmonary, nothing chronic,

just the human condition.

But mangos were not human,

And I found myself wishing that the seeds in my ovaries were mango seeds

And not human ones.

And therein lies the crux, the best part about the summer was the mangos.