TOUCH FRUIT

Eve, you insipid bimbo. I'm just like you.

I struggled to put my feelings into words until I had my bare hands in a vat of sweet cherries.

The red morsels beaded with sweat as customers fawned over them, admonished their hefty price and agonized over, no, mourned their use of pesticides — why, oh why, could they not have been satisfied with their natural beauty?

I stood behind the cherries, mouth shut, worried I’d offended these Northerners with my compulsive use of “yes, ma’am,” and “no, sir.” I twiddled my burgundy thumbs, sneaking glances at my hands covered in cherry juice and rings caked in a paste of deep red dirt and feeling secretly pleased that these appendages finally reflected their appearance in my head. Stained. Marred. Visceral.

visceral 1. : felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body : deep. a visceral conviction. 2. : not intellectual : instinctive, unreasoning.

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The people who raised me have always described me as cold and mean, but that never resonates. I yearn to be gentle — but I can’t find gentle in me right now, just distorted feminine screaming like Mistki in Drunk Walk Home.

(I think Screaming Mitski would be a great name for a cocktail. Something with cherries. Non-organic.)

Where did I leave my gentleness? In some editor’s inbox? Maybe I sweat it out hefting boxes of fruit at the farmer’s market, the salt crystals on my shoulders all that remained at the end of a long day. Or perhaps it was on Pennsylvania Ave, holding up a red line, where I admitted to myself that I had failed at becoming a journalist. On the bright side, I was finally free to protest against the gross atrocities in our world.

I’ve been harboring this newsletter because I’m worried you all will think I’ve gone crazy. I’m walking the line of self-censorship, hoping you’ll understand I chose cherries because they’re red without me having to say the word blood; hoping you’ll know the Latin word viscera refers to the soft internal organs of the body. I want you to know, without me having to say it, that I had dreams I failed to achieve and the soft animal of my body hurts like it should be covered in blood but it isn’t, just the sweet and sticky juice of the cherries.

One of my best friends, Avery, introduced me to the practice of calling myself crazy whenever I wanted. We call each other crazy, turning it into a collaborative effort, a distorted reality only we get to live in, a permanent sleepover. We marvel at how strong our brains are, how they’re able to convince us the world is ending, we’re having a stroke, none of this is real. We treat a bout of depression like a yeast infection — “It’s back again, get the boric acid” —  and wait it out. “Crazy” takes the pressure off.

With Avery, I don’t have to explain that I’m still terrified of losing my mind. I don’t have to interrogate my fear of insanity or say anything real about it. But it is real, my fear, and it lurks in dark corners waiting for me to slip up. Psychosis is closer than any of us think — a shift in brain chemistry triggered by a traumatic event, curiosity about psychedelics or even a nasty UTI. “Crazy” is the object in the rear-view mirror that’s closer than it appears.

I was two days out from a flight back to Denmark the first time Avery called me psychotic. We had just ordered drinks at a Laotian restaurant in a rapidly gentrifying D.C. neighborhood. That was also the night we met, and I had just finished explaining my graduate program — two years in Prague and Denmark, squeezing in whatever time I could with my long-distance boyfriend in D.C. and my family in Georgia. Avery gaped, wide-eyed, and changed my life forever:

“Your life is psychotic,” she said.

She’d recognized me instantly.

I didn’t feel crazy when I moved to Denmark. Once I wrenched myself from my boyfriend’s body, desperate to memorize the circumference of my arms wound tight around his waist, I forced myself through TSA with snot running down my chin and didn’t feel much at all. 

I had booked a ridiculous route for a cheap ticket. I flew from D.C. to Qatar to Copenhagen without sleeping or eating. I took a train to Aarhus, furnished my dorm at IKEA and made a group of friends without unpacking a suitcase. I kept moving forward for days, not noticing sensations like hunger or exhaustion or fear and not stopping to question why I felt nothing when I called home to say good night from separate continents. 

Then I fell in love with my new friends. I felt amazing when we were together, but my dorm beckoned at the end of the day, damp and quiet. The sky darkened earlier and earlier. It was the perfect place for fear to lurk. 

I started to wonder if those friends outside were real. My friends and family back home were real, but I only saw them through a screen. What if I’d gone crazy, and my dorm was a hospital room, and Denmark was a psych ward, and my new friends were fellow patients? 

I knew it was unreasonable, but I was afraid. Dissociation kept me safe. It was survival. It was instinct. It was visceral.

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If Denmark was an absence of feeling, this is the opposite. Everything feels like something. Most of it hurts. 

It reminds me of a silly conversation one night in Prague. We were recreating the beloved British comedy panel game show Taskmaster, at someone’s apartment, just for fun. A lot of work and humiliation goes into Taskmaster. Someone asked:

Q: “How are you feeling?”

A: “I feel dread.”

Q: “Where do you feel it?”

I feel it in my lungs.

Around my ankles.

In the muscles that allow me to make a fist and dig my nails into my palm.

I had a nightmare recently where Fabian said this newsletter was a waste of time because it wouldn’t further my career or make me any money. I slapped him in the face in front of my mother, who chastised me for being violent.

I want, after each release, for him to drop to his knees in wonderment. He who is not particularly fond of memoir. He who prefers the tedium of the Western Canon to the snarky yet touching revelations of a 25-year-old woman. My boyfriend reads my newsletter, giggles at a few lines that were not supposed to be funny and says, “Very nice.” It makes me want to scream and cry and dig my nails into his trendy little mullet and yank.

I picture myself like the baboon that climbed atop my friend in South Africa in 2019, pulling her hair and grabbing for the persimmon in her bag. Of all places, we were at the Cape of Good Hope. I contemplated my morality as the baboon flailed about on her head. She curled into a ball and sobbed, submitting to its strength. I stood and watched. I’d like to believe it was fear that paralyzed me, that I had no idea how to help, but I know the truth. It was self-preservation, cold and instinctive and visceral. 

Visceral is my word because my organs are so active. Sadness is an ache in my kidneys and a sharp pain in my right ovary. When someone asks how I feel, the answers burn up my esophagus and lodge themselves around my tonsils. I swear I’d have to tear apart my jaw to get them out. The silence swells in my skull, compressing my brain until visceral becomes vascular and restricts blood flow to my optic nerve. I see swirls, rainbows and zigzags where I once saw the blue light of another application.

Sometimes I wish I could scream the feelings out. Did anyone else have recurring childhood dreams of being chased by a madman or a monster, backed into a corner with your subconscious prompting you to cry for help? Only when you opened your mouth to scream, no sound followed.

If I could scream, it would be monstrous. My eyes and veins would bulge as my mouth opened wide around an ear-splitting shriek. I would wail like a banshee on a crowded street, passersby glancing lazily at the display.

I know I am overrun with metaphors here — I am the baboon, I am a banshee, I am myself watching the baboon. I hope you’ll forgive me for indulging my overactive imagination. 

Fruit might be the most tired metaphor of all. Sin itself, fruit symbolizes nearly everything from lust and fertility to cannibalism. It looks striking on the cover of the hottest psychological fiction. It’s the forbidden fruit, Eve, you insipid bimbo; Sylvia’s shriveled figs on the ground; Edward Cullen’s porcelain hands cradling a blood-red apple. 

And who am I to judge? I am the girl with a pomegranate tattoo under her right elbow, a covenant in ink and blood to wear my heart on my sleeve forever. 

I’ll get over myself. I’m just like other girls. I need to clutch ripe red stone fruit in my hands and let the burgundy stain my freshly nipped cuticles, a perfect complement to my nail color, Wicked by Essie. 

Better I hold too tightly, apply too much pressure, forget to be gentle and puncture the delicate skin of a cherry than the skin of my flesh or, God forbid, yours.