Good Peaches and Bad Peaches

Not much can come from writing with emotion, unless of course you are spectacularly gifted at channeling your angst into free verse. Then again, nothing much can come out of intellectualising your feelings either. At some point, we can tend to over analyse , usually because we want to explain away why exactly it is that we insist on treating each other like cunts.

The tendency to over think also makes for pretty dry writing, which is why I shy away from non-fiction. People seem to think that by writing down what happened on a particular day to a particular person, that they are in some way capturing the truth of that moment. But such a telling ignores completely the emotional truth of a situation, which is why we go (or went) to the movies, because a good old-fashioned story can dive straight to the heart of the matter, as it were.

The problem today is that we tend to watch the news or go online to read about the "facts", because in the wake of wikipedia and CNN information is what we crave, rather than truth. So, onto the peaches.

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Once upon a time, there was a young peach who had all the best advantages in life. He had a safe spot on his tree, nestled amongst the branches and the other peaches, safe from the prying beaks of passing birds. But he was not too nestled away that he didn't get enough sun. In fact, his tree was planted in a garden so warm and sun-kissed that he and his brothers grew to be large (but not fat), charming and generally well-rounded peaches.

He had a fine, if rather interrupted education at the hands of the caterpillars who built their cocoons in his tree, before bursting out in a flurry of colour and wings. It was always sad when his teacher-butterflies flew away, but it pleased him to think that they got to soar away over the horizon, to the distant regions Beyond the House, of which he knew very little.

Of course, such a well-rounded peach couldn't be kept on his tree forever, and he was itching to get away and see the world. But his tree loved him very much, and wanted him to stay. They began to bicker about it, especially whenever the young peach wanted to stay up late and watch the moon rise overhead. The tree didn't understand. She thought the garden was the greatest place in all the world, and that any sensible peach would want to stay right there. He could, she offered, even fall one day and land in the rich moist soil and grow into a great big tree himself. Wouldn't he like that?

Unfortunately, he didn't like it at all. He wanted to be free, unshackled, and though he loved his tree, he couldn't think of anything more sedate and fixed as the life of a tree. I want to see Beyond, he would say, whenever the wind shook the tree's branches, whistling about the peaches and whispering too. I want to go where the wind comes from, begged the young peach. I want to talk to the wind and swim in the sea and fly, like my teachers! His tree would shake her branches even more vigorously. There is no Beyond, she would say, and peaches can't fly.

It went on and on, and all the while the days grew shorter, and the wind bit more than it whispered. The young peach began to grow cold, as his fuzz did little to ward of the elements. Finally one day, when we were playing outside, we hit the tree with our ball, and the young peach flew off, landing in the damp grass. We gathered around, curious and hungry, but time and the cold had done their work. The peach was rotten.