Lemonade
Life gave me a promise from the very beginning.
Life gave me lemons, and they were beautiful.
I placed the plant on a high shelf and
they were so perfect you would have thought
God himself grew them in his garden.
Once, one of my lemons stretched her branch,
peered over the rim of a flower pot,
to glance at the rest of the world,
And she fell,
crashed
onto the hardwood floor.
I watched as the life drain out of her
and the lemon juice seep through the grains in the floor boards
leaving a stain.
And a pang of guilt sliced through my gut as I enjoyed the smell,
and I liked the taste of the tangy sweetness;
the bitterness and resistance of some sort.
I do not know if she jumped or fell.
After that, I moved my lemons down and placed them on the floor.
For years, they prospered, and then
then, one day, Life came back,
and tore my lemons off their stems.
Life slashed the fruit in half and I choked on citrus scent.
It drained the juice out, spoiling it with sugar,
and left the pulp in a pile as big as the pit in my stomach,
and the skin rotted away in the corner.
Back when my lemons were still my lemons,
Life gave me a promise.
Life didn’t mention that promise involved giving up all I ever had;
Life forgot to mention what I got out of this contract, of this promise.
And after Life left, I stood over the stain,
the only remnant I had left of my beautiful, perfect, God-given lemons.
So I ran my fingers over the edges of the broken bones of the flower pot.
I allowed my fingertips to drain
and I let the blood seep through the grains in the floor boards
leaving a stain, because
I would rather be that one lemon
who died whole and pure
than live a manufactured,
artificial lie.
I think she jumped.
I think she knew what this world would steal from her.
I think she stretched her branch,
peered over the rim of a flower pot
to glance at the rest of the world
and I don’t think she liked what she saw
So I think she jumped.
And I don’t think I blame her.
Life gave me lemons, so I made lemonade.
Life came back one day
with a success story.
I felt my insides knot up, clutching together
grasping at each other, scratching for something to hold on to.
So when Life asked me to do it again
to grow lemons again,
only for them to be torn apart again,
I looked down and saw how my hands had shriveled up from being wrung too many times
I wiped my eyes and seeds bounced off my cheek bones instead of tears.
My soul rotted away from the sickle sweetness and now it sits inside of me, weighing me down.
My skin is tattooed with the scars left behind from zesting away my flesh, and
I reached into my body and tried to mold the clump of pulp back into a heart, and
apparently it’s quite deceiving because
no body seems to notice the missing heart beats,
or how it’s much heavier now,
or how fakely sweet I am now because
lemonade runs through my veins instead of blood.
That was the day I realized that
someday, somewhere, someone gave Life humans,
so Life made the only thing it knew how to make;
Lemonade.