Peach | 24 February 2026

The acid of the juice burned my cuticles, dripped down my chin, and lit up my senses.  Biting into the tender flesh I felt like a new animal, awake for the first time in months.

BNR Response

I squeezed my eyes closed and sucked the nectar into my mouth, titled my head back and felt the breeze catch its traces on my chin.  As I wiped the back of my hand across my face, eyes still closed in an extended moment of savoring, I smelled the air change around me - injected with exhaust from a delivery truck and perfumed steam from the launderette.  I reopened my eyes and my surroundings had shifted: I was in Manhattan at the Chelsea Flea and I was in the decade of my twenties again.  I looked down at my hand, expecting the peach to have disappeared, and yet, it was still there.  Unsure of my feet but open to this daydream, I wandered through the market finishing the last few bites of my peach.  I stopped to look at trinkets in a scratched plexi display case, so many shiny gems and reflective faces of lockets and signet rings blinked back at me.  I rinsed my hands under a running spigot and wiped them against my jeans so I could run my hands through all the hanging textiles.  Music started to play somewhere nearby and I looked up, smiling into the air at the recognition of a song that took me away.  A handsome face smiled back at me.  “The sky is burning | A sea of flame | Though your world is changing | I will be the same.”  Roxy Music. 

For the next hour we wove around each other, nearer and then far, behind and ahead until I realized he was shoulder to shoulder with me at the edge of the Flea on West 25th Street.  I giggled, instantly annoyed at my total lack of guile, and I could feel my cheeks hot with red.  I looked down but quickly looked skyward as rain started to patter down.  He instinctively reached for my hand and we ran across the street like children who are told only to cross roads with a buddy.  I didn’t snatch my hand away.  I didn’t snatch my hand away.  We ducked under an overhang, and he titled his head in the direction of a warm, pink-lit bistro.  “Join me for an hour or five?” he asked.  “Yes, please.” I whispered and followed him in.  Who knew those hours would turn into four years?

I opened my eyes and the peach is still with me.  I took another bite, wondering if I will journey again.  The juice sunk down my throat and caught a raw spot like salt in a wound.  My breath stuck in my neck and I put my hand to my chest.  I closed my eyes to breathe and when I opened them I was in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, when I was in my early thirties.  My other hand was tied up with someone ahead of me, like elephants link trunk to tail, and the outstretched arm ahead was disappeared in a sea of weekend farmers marketers.  We whisked past the mushroom lady and all her oyster, shiitake, and lion’s mane.  We passed the dapper mustachioed man pouring champagne at the caviar bar.  I stumbled and try to keep up, my shoulders brushing on passer-bys in line for Blue Bottle, pushing past with their oversized bouquets of tulips and daffodils, bundling up before heading back outside into the chilly sun.  The air was fragrant with fog and fresh seafood and must.  I turned my eyes up and marvel at the wonderful architecture of the building, the echos, and the smells.  We stopped and I finally get to see the face attached to the hand I’ve been holding, my god he looked so young.  Not yet weary-eyed from so many long days and longer arguments, stomach still lean from uninterrupted stretches of exercise, and those crows feet he’d had since day one still looked fresh.  “Babe, you fancy some oysters?”  He said to me.  We somehow missed the line at Hog Island and the first taste of prosecco on my lips hit like a deep breath.  He reached for my hand across the table, and he absentmindedly squeezed me as he sees that the Kumamotos haven’t run out yet.  A busker on the pier side was playing a favorite, and I let the moment wash over me.  “Someone told me there’s a girl out there, with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.” 

“Should we order two dozen, love?”  that sweet, young, face asks.  “Yes, please.”  I reply, not wanting to see the next ten years slip away just yet.

I opened my eyes and the peach is gone.  There’s no trace of it in my mouth, but its juice is all over my hands.  Things are coming back into sharp relief – I was in Nashville and the sun was deafening.  I smelled grass and humidity and I heard cicadas.  I was alone, bereft, in a sea of tourists dotted with local farmers.  Sadness stung the back of my throat and tears streaked my cheeks like mustangs running free.  The nostalgia was so thick I wished I could physically cut it out of me.  This peach had taken me away from myself like Proust’s madeleine and I hadn’t asked for it.  I hadn’t asked for this.  These worlds that collapsed upon me, I had never chased them.  I was open to them, yes, and why is being open always met with punishment.

I heard my name called and my eyes sharpened quickly in that way that draws the tears back into your head.  My focus became a beam.  I rushed ahead, jogging between lost bachelorettes and clueless meanderers until I find my person.  Here’s my person.  I reached my arm down and scooped up the little hand.  “Hey, do you want an ice cream to cool off?”  I asked.  “Yes, please, Mom.”  All those decades of spinning and loss had brought me right to this point in Middle Tennessee on an unbearably hot day under this tin roof in the middle of July and I was exactly where I was always meant to be.  Yes, please.