I let the citrus crescent hang just a little too long above my half-cocked lips before I reach for it, camelopardalis-like, with my outstretched tongue. It slides deliberately down the slickness. I bite down on it slowly, consciously, only after scraping the white striations against my hard palette as I thrust it with my tongue. I savor the fleshiness of the fruit as it mashes in between my dentition, allowing the barely-sweet juice to flood the cavern, mixing with my burgeoning saliva. Within seconds, the luscious flesh and nectar have all but dissolved to hardly a memory. And all I am left with is the tough, stringy skin to ruminate; my jaw tiring under the tension and torque. But I refuse another segment until the previous has been swallowed to completion. Once the fibrous vegetation has been sufficiently ground, I force it down my throat with the tenuous remaining spit. The catch twenty-two of the mandarin. It makes me thirst for more. It lures me in with its succulent aroma and brilliant hue. The color of the coruscating sun as seen through squinted slits, on the most relucent and cloudless August afternoon. It hooks me with that first juicy squish of honeyed and toothsome flesh, but it is a decadent trick, an ambrosial ruse, for I am right back in that taunting, cotton-mouthed plight before I realize. Oh you cursed, lovely, dastardly, beautiful fruit. Your nefarious seduction is not lost on me. The real sanctimonious genius of this citrus manipulation lies in the power of its allure. For even knowing this, I still open my mouth and beg for more.
"Come here, kiddo."
When the morose side takes control, there is no stopping its freight train of melancholy and reticence, except to choke and claw my way out. When I'm in that lachrymose underworld, I forget entirely how happy I can actually be. There is a disconnect. The demons take over and hold back the lightness with their maces and battle axes. They don't allow those gossamer emotions through. I am forced to do battle. But I've gotten good at fighting, expert, even. As what happens with years of practice. For the pendulum always swings the other way. But sometimes it needs a push.
I think knowing the things I know and having experienced the things I have, could work out in my favor more than I even had realized. There lies the loftiest challenge of my life. Not buying into a feigned positivity fantasy necessary for a shred of happiness the Xanxed set tries to shove down my throat, but machete-ing my way through the dense abhorrence with humor and philosophy; the only quasi-healthy coping mechanisms I can muster, to find a way to be happy in the face of undeniable gloom. Laying to waste the torture, rape, and evil, of my mind and the world, leaving it slain on either side of the freshly cut verdant path. Streaks of crimson smudged with ebony and snuff suffusing with the malachites and mosses of the once-fertile, now-impotent, beheaded flora; putrid and rotting in the Equatorial heat. It makes for arduous and sweat-drenched labor; wrestling and warring with these ideas in my mind. But it feels good to not understand something right away. Finally. It's like reading Camus. It makes me feel human, instead of superhuman or more often, subhuman. Happiness exists somewhere. I've felt it; I feel it. It's the only thing that makes me hungry, ravenous. It fans the fire in my belly. Not darkness, not sullenness, not evil. Love is the only currency my soul deals in. Lovey-dovey is the only way I can survive. And unconditional love is all I have to give. I am wholly open to the flaws and eccentricities of the human race, and they sense it; those seedy, smokey, creatures of the night. Therein lies the essence of my bewitching charm; that is the crux of my freak magnetism. Flaws are far more virtuous than perfections. They are far more human. Platonic ideals should never be realized. Happiness lives in the endeavor. For if all happiness is fleeting, we must be in constant pursuit. It keeps stagnation at bay. Spring is steadfastly approaching. I let the wildflowers grow all around me.
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