Sugar

Remember that time you made me swallow a teaspoon of sugar?
I never realised that something so sweet could be repulsive.

That was also the day you told me that if I never learned to swim then I would surely die because just as a newborn yearns to suckle warm milk, girls who lived next to still waters drown. I didn't understand what you meant. I had no intention of ever going into that lake. Its hypnotic blue I could refuse for what use did I have for ponds which house slimy eels with gaping mouths? I knew the stories, I knew that no one dared to see what remained at the beds. The green, dewy groves was my home, above, high above where no one could sink. I would lay there, my gaze following, tracking course of sunlight across the grass. I would watch the light slowly pull away, bleaching the earth at noon and giving back at dusk, that orange summer light was what I lived on, that and the chill air in the morning. To teach me a lesson, or to frighten me (which I was) you with your strength threw me into the pond. I didn't hate you then, then I was paralyzed, heart thumpingly, nauseatingly terrified. I felt a million alien mouths suctioning along my limbs, their wetness (a different feel to the water) sliding up and over and inside. You pulled me out, silent and immobile. You laughed at me, even more two nights later when I told you of water inside me.

Remember that one time you lost your tooth?
You pulled it out and set it in the middle of my desk, a mess of blood and tooth and kleenex.

It was the day that we both stopped eating eggs for a year. You were feeling nice and wanted to make us both scrambled eggs. I wanted so badly to help, you let me crack eggs: one, two, three, four. The fifth egg had a chick inside, already dead (for how long?. We didn't speak, only stared at the mutated creature, yellow with tidbits of feathers and transparent skin. You threw the scrambled eggs (and bird) into the bin and made peanut butter sandwiches instead, it seemed to be an unspoken agreement to not eat eggs, I still prefer not to.

The Wednesday that you thought it would be the world's greatest creation of art to lay down covered with honey atop an anthill. What a sight you were, extraordinary, still with thousands of black dots drowning in gold. Afterwards you smoked a single stolen cigarette, I remember how bright the orange was, the way you swiped your thumb over the metal lighter as if you had done this a hundred times before. We sat outside, the darkness swallowing and grey lines of smoke drifting off.