#repasta

Our love is like lemons--sour and fresh. And though an old man once said "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade", lemonade will always be bitter if you don't have any sugar, and sometimes the only way to make the best of a situation is to toss that lemonade out and try again and again until somehow the chemical reaction of lemons and water create that certain sweetness that you can't find in Splenda packets. Only, when we try again, as like breeds like, the lemons grow more bitter with each passing year and their juices, acerbic and mean, bite into my open wounds like a thousand hypodermic porcupine needles that don't carry a cure or vaccine to this madness called love but are a pox inoculation gone wrong. Invisible boils raise and burst on my skin and it is clear as day to only you. The others stand by and wonder why I am crying and my eyes are despondent and when you come too near I begin to beat my fists against my chest and issue a warning howl that, of course, you never listen to. They ask me to stop and reconsider and try, try again; that my efforts are one-sided and I have a hidden agenda that is not for my own good but for my own greed, as if I worship not God but Mammon in his stead.

So I try my best to let our lemons rot, but no matter how hard I try our sour love won't fertilize new grounds and sow the seeds of something gentler. But legend has it that lemons take months to decompose and either way I believe that our lemons have been preserved in the vitriol and brine of our love. So perhaps it's futile to get away from you, that fate deems it necessary that I am the ocean that breaks against your rock but no matter how hard, how long I try, you are unchanging while my scars are laid bare to the ocean's tears.

And I lack the strength, I have always lacked the strength, to wash over you and your rock and your troubles that hang heavy from our lemon tree. A tree that I planted 23 years ago in our backyard in the frozen tundra of Churchill.