Slicing Peaches

I learned a good way to slice peaches last year.

I can't really remember what I did before, I think I used to cut them in half and try to get the pit out from the middle, after which I would slick the halves into wedges. Oh the barbarous uncouth of those times!

I learned how from a woman named Laina.

Laina is a professional chef who lives in Amsterdam, who joined the Brussels team as the caterer for Serve the City. I volunteered for kitchen duty because I was desperately seeking a job during the week that would keep me hidden, safely behind the scenes but still involved with people. Serve the City was a big gathering, lots of people, and I tend to hide in those settings, not because I dislike human contact, but because I get so worked up and worried. Having something to do with my hands, working alongside, eases that strain. And it was good to spend my time in that basement kitchen, at Holy Trinity, I enjoyed the cameraderie, the conversation during the busyness and the methodical work to do with my hands when conversation waned.

Laina is California beautiful, a woman whose friendly eyes and magical hands belie a nearly fierce intensity. Although that intensity shines through strong blue eyes, her demeanor is not off putting. I tend to get hypersensitive around hard people. Her colorful arm tattoos, Irish crosses in the style of illuminated manuscripts are unequivocally cool.

Flash forward to here. I’m slicing a peach for my nephew, putting the pieces in his little bowl, remembering how and where I learned to slice them this way.

I really enjoy slicing fruit, cutting them into pieces, freezing grapes and sucking on them like hard candy. Making a big bowl of fruit for myself is one of my favorite things to do, slicing the pieces and mixing the colors.

It does fill me up, the immediacy of both here and there, in these early stages of transition. Everything is evocative, like the first days and weeks after a breakup. That song, that shade of color, a smell or a metro ticket in my wallet. I threw a lot out, but I still have bits of paper that are written in French and Dutch, from a place where Parc/Park and Arts-Loi/Kunst-Wet was my everyday. Just two weeks ago I was walking on cobblestones, taking the metro and the tram everywhere, and now I'm driving to the supermarket. Both places feel present tense. A peach here is that time I sliced those peaches there, but I don't want to be distracted from here now, especially not while I am surrounded by people I love. That is a waste of time. Literally a waste of time, dwelling too much in the past flushes the present moment down the toilet, and time passes, it passes while you hover in between, neither here nor there when here could be good.

The hum of activity in my head is a constant, less like a rhythm section and more like a heckler in the audience at the moment, but always there nevertheless. And I'm constantly narrating my life, so that I'm aware that I'm navigating through grief and a sense of loss. In transition, I'm straddling two worlds, constantly narrating them both, and the narrator says that is a waste of time. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and all that. I am not eager to leave the other world behind, part of me is afraid to let it go too quickly because I fear that that would mean it didn't really happen. I am afraid that the memories will take on a hazy, dreamlike quality. That other life, the one across the ocean that's well and truly finished, is living parallel in me here at the same time that I feel and see and think everything so brightly in the Miami sun.

But, when I think about it more, that parallel life, those memories, are not really alive. That life is a dead thing, a plucked fruit. Fruit rots in the sun, you know, says the narrator. It smells good and I want to hold it here with me, I fear that it will be gone forever if I eat it.