Writers Jam

The first bite into a medjool date: soft, rich, luscious. An ooze of caramel within the chewy texture. The sensation of your teeth tearing away at the fibroids, as sugar permeates your tongue. Almost sickly sweet sometimes but always so fucking satiating. Then all of a sudden… a loud crunch. An unfriendly guest greets your teeth by being too damn hard. You have met the pit.

            Good things in life are seldom uninterrupted, so you work your way around the pit. You try not to bite into its’ hard exterior and manage to extract all the goodness of the date from around it, then you spit it out. The date is so scrumptious, you’re willing to accept the pit that accompanies it.

        Love? How could I even begin to tackle this one when everybody and their mother have written on this topic since time immemorial? How could I contribute my two cents when the likes of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Pablo Neruda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz and John Donne have covered it all- front-to-back, end-to-end? What more is left to explore, especially by someone like myself who has never experienced it? Well, perhaps it was time to talk about platonic love. After all, friendships are the spiciest flavour of love with varying degrees of hot on the Scoville scale. I could have delved into my first friendship or the newest friend in my present life or the times my friends shaped my confidence, built my self-esteem, and helped mould my sense of self but it would be redundant and perhaps not very poetic (and writing about love in any way that isn’t poetic, might as well be considered criminal.) Instead I chose to indulge my most pretentious side (arguably) and built on the metaphor of eating a date. What can I say, lately I’ve been obsessed with dates.