apples, melons, and cherries We will carry pockets full of gold, reads the letter Samantha holds in her cold hands, and apples that taste like melons. In the end, we will not need each other, but only our dreams. It is December 21st; four days before Christmas and another day tacked onto the seemingly endless weeks of snow. Samantha (who is not really Samantha or even Samantha-called-Sam but Tha, pronounced Fah) left her house at ten AM to escape a number of things, including her naggy mother and her overhyper little brother and her singing father. The household of the American lifestyle, surely, thinks Tha in the gloomy afternoon glow. They even have a cat that sleeps on the porch. Tha escaped from the cherry-red house and the peeling white veranda and a cell phone that absolutely would not stop ringing, until finally her boyfriend Ned thought better of calling her and sent her a long e-mail instead. Convinced that the screen of her plasma monitor will give her cancer, Tha printed out the letter and took it with her in the pocket of an old tweed. She holds it now, tightly, in ungloved fingers. It talks of dense forests with dancing faeries that grant eternal wishes, but in the end will eat you up. And of queens with moustaches that swallow swallows in the moonlight of summer. And, Tha thinks wistfully, of apple trees that grow perfect men to the tune of Hallelujah. Ned is the most amazing person Tha has ever had the pleasure of meeting--or not really meeting, as she fell in love with him by pushing him into a mud-puddle in the eighth grade--and it is this that has brought her here today, on the onset of real winter, printer ink smearing onto her palms. Cherries will be made without pits. Samanthas will be called Sams, and not Thas. Chai tea lattes will be made on time in Starbucks not too hot, and I will still have the scar. There is a scratch shaped like the sign for eternity on the inside of Ned's left arm, which he got from fighting with a wire fence. Tha was there to see it, to watch him struggle with the rusty wires and curse loudly when they cut him. Not very blessed in first aid, she could only hand him the iodine and bandages while he patched himself up afterwards. Will you still love me when I am gone? Tha reads the rest of the letter, which sums itself up into one sentence. It ends anno Domini, 1492, your Cherry-Pit, Ned. (1492 was the year that they met in: a project on Christopher Columbus in the sixth grade, Ned all glasses and Tha all plaid and braids. Cherry-Pit was the nickname Ned received when they first kissed: over a bowl of cherries in the backyard of Tha's aunt, getting the seed lost between their connection.) There is no postscript, no extra cautions or farewells. He is breaking up with her, though. It is so painstakingly clear: he is moving to a foreign land in two days and she will not be able to take it. Ned is a smart boy, he knows what dense forests do to the average human and what queens really do to helpless birds and that he will never grow from an apple tree, or become a pocket full of gold. He is, indeed, an apple that tastes like a melon: imperfect to the highest degree. And yes, Tha will still love him when he is gone--through choruses of Hallelujah ('the minor fall and the major live'). Ned will not call her tomorrow nor the next day when he is at the airport (or the train station or the stables) and Tha will never ever return him a reply. It is, she thinks as she pulls the shabby tweed round her tiny shoulders, just the way things are. Melons and apples. Swallowing swallows. As she walks back home she stuffs the letter in a dead rosebush and runs home on her boots-caked-with-ice. Her cell phone says 22 missed calls, and her brother drew on the walls in the kitchen again, in bright Sharpie. Suburbia lives. Cherry pits are biodegradable, and meld into the ground. Tha goes into her room, taking an apple with her. Notes: Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley. back