Now that I will not be falling in love this summer, I suppose it is time to start a substack.
The only logical consolation. Shelby has been trying to convince a petulant, stubborn me for months—and though she professed she wishes the circumstances that brought me here were different—she is happy with the result. And Shelby is always right. Much like finishing an entire bag or box of cherries, these pieces will be designed to be consumed in one sitting, though you may feel a bit sick afterwards. Pull up a chair and a handful. Unlike the rest of my writing which remains suffocated by debilitating perfectionism, this will be a place for more unrefined stories, hot takes, heartbreaks, and pseudo-philosophical political rants. To my one and only reader, Shelby, I love you, thank you for your unwavering friendship, for asking me about cherries, and for believing in me.
When I was eighteen, I met one of my great loves. I’d previously experienced pangs of longing for my best friend—she wanted nothing to do with me—and for a while I’d even had an age inappropriate boyfriend. But this was the first time I really fell. Like holding my breath for years without realizing, suddenly I reached the surface and came up gasping. I could write out the entire story but John Green has written plenty of books and all you really need to know is the beginning. I was sitting in a diner, late at night, in the corner next to the jukebox, drinking a glass of POG, coloring with crayons, and a very tall boy in a snapback sat down in the booth next to me. He was not my type. I thought he was Chad Michael Murray.
We sort of made eyes at each other. I decided to request a song. This was prior to the creation of my least favorite app—TouchTunes—which allows people to remain comfortably in their seats, and in anonymity, while they select some absolutely asinine pop song from the other side of the room. Anyway, I had to stand up and walk four feet to the jukebox. Acutely aware of my grass-stained Jane Goodall shorts, floral baseball cap, and flip flop combo—my music choice had to make up for my less than show-stopping appearance. I selected Hey Ya! Outkast is generally a safe choice.
In part distracted by the pair of eyes I could feel on my back and generally clueless with all things technology, I spent over five agonizing minutes tapping, clicking, jamming my cash in and out of, and finally kicking the jukebox before giving up. As I turned to sit back down, eyes met mine.
“That’s a dope hat.”
I panicked.
“Do you…want to wear it?”
Evidently, he was the kind of person who would accept trading hats with a stranger as an acceptable means of social interaction. He handed me his hat and pointed out that the stain on the brim was not, in fact, blood, but from when he went blueberry picking the other day. I pointed out how terrible his massive hat looked on my tiny head. We laughed. I blushed and mumbled what was probably nonsense until it seemed the appropriate time to give the man his hat back.
Hat in hand, I slid back into my booth. Suddenly, “ONE, TWO, THREE, UH!” erupted from the jukebox, and I heard Chad Michael Murray exhale a “Yesss.” Apparently the jukebox had heard my prayer and taken my money after all. Mouthing every lyric, we swayed and smiled through the verses. I could tell from the depth of his eyes he had seen a lot, but in this moment he was joyful, and I felt like I was a part of it. I felt something broken in me fall back together, like in movies where a glass shatters and they reverse the film and the glass flies back into place, whole again.
Time passed, in that land of the lotus eaters sort of way time passes in a diner in the middle of the night. I glanced over at his table and watched out of the corner of my eye as he showed his friend a video of corgis running up stairs in slow motion. We affixed our crayon drawings to the wall together. No introductions were made, it was merely a string of small, seemingly insignificant interactions in the suspended aura of a very special diner, where talking to strangers is encouraged.
He hopped out of his seat with a swing in his step, and lingered before walking out the door. I caught his eye and pouted. He smirked and stepped out. I balked at his smugness. I must have read those soulful eyes wrong. He was just some jerk who thought he was hot shit. I was so distraught it took me thirty minutes to notice the servers had yet to clear the table. At that time, [the diner I will continue to gatekeep] was the kind of place that had people waiting out the door, even at midnight on a Wednesday. Especially at midnight on a Wednesday. It was lying in plain sight. A piece of coloring paper on his side of the table, with his name and number written in big, bold handwriting. He had even done that silly thing where you use two colors to add dimension.
I snatched the paper up from the table, staring at the pink crayon scrawled across the page, the tiny doodle of the Space Needle on the back, and his name. I asked the server if she thought it was for me. She rolled her eyes.
I texted him something stupid and made him guess my name. He called the next day. He was leaving the state at the beginning of July. He didn’t seem to know exactly where he was going. Something about buses, trains, the desert. That gave us two weeks. Maybe because I was going away to college in a couple months myself, maybe because I didn’t yet know how quickly I could fall, maybe because something in me told me I had to—I still agreed to see him.
From that first phone call he challenged me. He was instantly able to cut through the protective layer of self-effacing bullshit I have cloaked myself in at various stages of life. I felt a sureness around him and I loved making him laugh. There were all these funny coincidences. It turned out my childhood best friend was his dear friend’s younger sister. I had unknowingly attended a performance where he read his poetry six years prior. I somehow mentioned I’d been to Breckenridge, Colorado. He asked when. February 2014. Had I gone to the Crepe Shack? Of course I had. He worked there that winter. Either he or his brother would have handed me a crepe, he said.
We were both looking up at the night sky. I from my childhood bedroom window, one leg out, him from a cabin porch somewhere miles away. I would see a silver star shoot across the horizon and exclaim “LOOK NORTH” and hear the grin on the other line. For hours, between conversation and laughter, we played tag with stars and space junk. At one point I saw a comet, slower, streaking across the sky in gold. Satellite, heading west, do you see it? Yup.
“So we’re like satellites,” he said, “always just barely missing each other—on different paths—”
But our paths had finally crossed. I am not sure fate and coincidence are different things, but whichever had grazed my life I was grateful. A few days later I spent our first warm June evening marveling as he chatted up pizza shop owners, kids in the skatepark, and just about everyone else we came across. Seeing this changed me; I wanted my life to look like that. Back in the car. I drove while he ate an empanada. He guided me through the city streets. Turn here. I whined about missing the sunset. Right here. Left. Hey, you’re way too far into the crosswalk, if I were a pedestrian I would have tapped your hood. Left. Right. Here we are. He pointed and I turned my head to face the backlit mountains over the sea—
“I told you we wouldn’t miss it. This is the best part. When the sun is barely in the sky so it’s painted on the waves instead.”
I never noticed before. We skipped rocks. I froze my toes. He took a call. I listened to the Spanish and smiled from my driftwood log. We balanced on cinderblock fences discussing cynicism and the future of our world until it became too cold to not retreat to the car. His foot brushed up against papers I’d tossed in the passenger seat. I snatched the very sad essay I’d written a few weeks earlier out of his hands. He apologized. I looked into those eyes that are sometimes gray and sometimes green and sometimes blue and saw that despite the inconstancy in their color a stability and kindness that I didn’t see again for a long time. I was safe there. So I read my writing aloud to another person for the first time.
“I know I am going to kick myself for this later but I am not going to kiss you in this car right now, no matter how much I want to.” I think I smiled. Some attempt at a poker face. I probably asked why.
“Because I want to be able to call you six months from now and for you to eagerly pick up the phone. I don’t want to ruin all this because I rushed. And I don’t want you to be an escape.”
And because I was eighteen and neither of our prefrontal cortexes had developed we kissed anyway. Some people deal with a tendency towards excess by attempting to exercise self-restraint. And some of us just barrel towards oblivion. I have since learned—and it has taken almost an entire decade—that when someone foreshadows a lack of capacity to love you, it is not a challenge. You cannot love someone out of their grief. You cannot love someone into loving themselves or you.
I only saw him three or four times in those few weeks and even looking back, after everything, as insane as it sounds, I do think in those three or four evenings I fell in love. Not butterflies, or puppy love, or passion. The kind of love where instead of racing, your heart near flatlines as soon as they walk into the room. Love that quiets you both and feels like melting.
He would call and give me coordinates. Just a block off of Rainier. Standing at the Shell Gas Station. I always found him. This time he needed help dumping a mattress. I had a longstanding fantasy about lying on a mattress in a truck bed. We ended up in a grassy field on my blanket instead. The stars were dim and low in the sky. It was a full moon, so bright it felt like day. I knew it was probably the last time I would see him, so at some point I attempted to use sex in hopes of rendering myself unforgettable. Fortunately, I did not succeed. Somewhere along the way I broke the chain that hangs around his neck, holding his late grandmother’s house key. He laughed at the sky, said it was symbolic, and pulled me in. I’m sorry, I said, flustered and sad. I just wanted tonight to be memorable.
“And you think sex was the way to do that? God, when I’m 95 years old and I don’t even remember your name I’ll remember how your face looked lit up by the moon.”
Sometimes I think I’m not supposed to write these things down, or at least I’m not supposed to share them with anyone. Because every time I read that my stomach turns. And I don’t know if that’s because my behavior was embarrassing or what he said was cheesy or because it still means something to me and I don’t want people to think it’s silly. If someone said that to me now I genuinely don’t know if I would laugh, scowl, or cry. But we were kids. It was sincere and meaningful and foolish and true in the way only teenage love is. I often wonder if in the extravagance of youth we give our affections away all too readily, on the mistaken assumption we’ll always have more to give.
I shared my dreams with this person, dreams I didn’t yet believe in. And in the most direct and least flowery way possible—which perhaps ever since is the kind of love I respond most strongly to—he made me feel like I could do anything. Some people you just believe.
I climbed into the back of the truck bed and wrapped myself in a blanket. He got my polaroid out of the passenger seat and snapped a picture. I yelled at him to stop shaking it. Outkast was wrong about that one. I never saw it develop. He pretended to drop and lose it—but I saw him slip it into his wallet.
We didn’t make it to July. We skipped just enough rocks to change my life. And before the two weeks were up I was standing across from a broken boy in front of a white pickup truck under the streetlights as he said I am so sorry I have nothing to give and cannot receive and I am unraveling and I do not want to pull you under. Things I won’t write here had happened to his family. Everything he knew was turning to sand. The grief was too much. I hoped the polaroid was a good one.
Late June changed color to heartbreak. This time of year in Washington is peak cherry season. I ate so many cherries I was sick for days. Like multiple bags. I’m not really sure what possessed me. Something about wanting to externalize my pain. Something about excess.
Nearly ten years later, I am suffering a fresh heartbreak just before June’s end. I’ve had my heart broken a handful of times between then and now, by longer relationships with presumably more weight behind them—but never since in June, marked by unmentionable personal tragedies, and never since in that teenagery sort of way where you’re so scared and so hopeful and they change you from the first meeting and you don’t know why but you just believe them. And somehow Fluorescent Adolescent is always playing.
When the spring air was still cool, I got inappropriately weepy on our first date and said something about attempting to reconcile with my teenage self. Her misplaced confidence, her sparkle, and apparently, her love of the Arctic Monkeys. Which was prophetic because this person made me feel like I was eighteen again. And in true cataclysmic time-is-a-flat-circle fashion, I find myself at the end of June, reaching for cherries. Having a Pavlovian response like some sort of soft animal.
You cannot swallow a falling star or eat another person’s heart—though, shocker, Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my favorite movies. I am not interested in cannibalism, but I imagine eating cherries is the closest comparable sensation. I am sure there is a metaphor there.
I’ve been trying for ten years to coax a poem out of those little red fruits. It’s always too obvious, too on the nose. My relationship to overindulgence is something about myself I don’t entirely understand and certainly do not like. In love and in stone fruits I just don’t know when to stop. Maybe as long as I am eating cherries I am engaged in something pleasurable and can avoid feeling the loss and rejection. When something hits the fan or someone hits the brakes at least I can eat my favorite fruit in surfeit. Technically, surfeited means to cause (someone) to desire no more of something as a result of having consumed or done it to excess.
But that’s the thing. I’ve never made myself sick of cherries.
I desire to desire cherries. I desire to consume something that has an end. I cannot eat all the cherries in the world but at least a box of cherries in one sitting has a clear beginning and end. There is a process of desiring, consuming, and poisoning that ends until I acquire more. I am sick from but not of. A catharsis quite unlike my longing that has no container around itself, temporally or otherwise. A bottomless pit. I am afraid of the pit. Oh, that’s a pun. I hate puns but I will leave that one in there as a happy accident. Or for penance. Maybe the cherries are punishment. Cherry pits contain hydrocyanic acid. As cherry leaves wilt, they release cyanide. Desire interrupted tends to mutate into obsession—and obsession does feel sinful. I fantasize up endless permutations of reality until I’m ill. But I can’t stop.
The words permutation and mutate derive from the Latin mutare, which also bore the word “mutual.” There is nothing mutual about any of this. An inability to reciprocate is one thing—philosophically speaking—it is the “I cannot receive” element of my cherry heartbreaks that troubles me and leads me to immoderation. If a person cannot receive it, where does my spillover love go? The pop science answer is that I must redirect it towards myself. But this love is feral and mutated. It is too late. Nor do I want it. It has selected an object of desire and when unmet or rejected there is an unruly retroflexion that happens. It tears something open in me, the unmerciful black hole opens and I have no choice but to fill it with cherries.
Lying awake in the middle of the night, tongue stained, stomach aching terribly, I remembered the song my mother used to sing as I fell asleep—
I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby, with no crying…
The next verse asks, how can there be a cherry that has no stone ? Which is answered in the final refrain—
A cherry in its blossom, it has no stone.
The answer is there, hiding in the poetry of my repressed childhood memory. My love is not a bottomless pit when it is in blossom. But there is a catch—for unthwarted and hopeful almost-love is mortal. It is ephemeral and can fall, fade, or freeze. So there is also comfort in turning to stone. There is a warmth in the darkness of the nebulous, neverending desire for cherries—that I never lose my taste for.
In many folkloric traditions, including my ancestral Polish, cherries and their trees are used in powerful medicines. I look at the cherry tree out my window, its tendriled branches nearly tapping the glass, cyanide soaked leaves fluttering in the too-hot breeze. The poison is the cure.
There is even a Patron Saint of Cherries. His name was Gregory the Great, which is ridiculous. Known for his frugality, he was allegedly overcome one spring day—the week of my birthday no less—with an incomprehensible desire for cherries. Servants and gardeners were at a loss, as cherries were simply not in season. And then ! One particularly despairing gardener was visited by Saint Mark in a “cloud of fire”—okay—who used his magic fire powers to bless a tree with instantaneous cherries. How convenient. “Gregory” presumably then gorged himself. If I had known eating an exorbitant amount of cherries could have elevated me to sainthood, I would have written this a lot sooner.
The story of the saints led me down a research rabbit hole that quickly revealed cherries’ place in mythology: the cherry is consecrated to Venus, Aphrodite, Rubiga—goddesses of love. And, better yet, witches across the world and throughout history have used cherry in—you guessed it—love spells. My heartbreak fruit, associated with luck in romance. Love potions ! Sainthood ! My ancestral subconscious was onto something after all.
Desire takes us from one place to another and risking the unknown for a chance at love is always noble. And cherries are delicious. They remind me of when the world felt big. I am nostalgic for the improvidence of youth and the gold smell of the Seattle summer grass. I carry both like pits in my stomach.
Perhaps all I have described is the feeling of hunger and the loss of an idea. Someone did not want to love me or did not want me to love them and I craved cherries. Some people disappear into despair and some disappear into piles of fruit. That first love had many more seasons and became one of my closest friends. I guess the cherries worked. The other I may never hear from again. Sometimes grief is insurmountable and sometimes people resurface and sometimes they don’t at all. Sometimes people lie.
This week, on the way to buy an inordinate amount of cherries for my teenage self, I saw a massive crate of them smashed, splattered, and run over by tire marks, bloodjuice spilling into the sidewalk cracks on the city street.
I had to smile. Proof that the spirit of the universe is real.
And it has a sense of humor.