The lover (masculine) is an unripe tomato.
He is growing, changing, dangling by the scruff of his neck on a bough of the bushel of life. His mind is as a vegetable’s, but in fact he is a fruit. He is green, and his skin holds tight around his gooey interior–it seals him together like shrink wrap.
He knows his end–to be devoured whole by the eager lips of another. But there is a wait to be had, more growing to be done. Gestation leads to birth leads back to gestation. Everything must come full circle before anything can step forward. Crop rotation.
Love will awaken in the fall, when the girls step out of doors with their rain boots and their vintage dresses and their knitted hats, and they run to the fields to chase after the boys who fell from the vine.
By now the lover’s green skin has rouged, and he is soft and juicy and plump and veritably crimson, like a bruise or a carnivalesque blush. And the girls want to scoop the lover up in their pale, painted hands, like a mother would a baby, or a wounded bird.
And the tomato-heart-lover is a wounded bird, or he will be when the women have their rounds with him.
The problem of the lover: That everyone who seeks to love is afraid of getting sticky and dirty. Every girl ceases after the first bite.
And what happens when the lover’s sanguine skin is broken? Well, that’s when the sweetness turns all sour, when the insides start to turn and rot and fall apart.
The problem of love: Everyone wants a taste, but no one wants to swallow.
The remnants of love: sloughed tomato skin and lover’s spit.
The lover (masculine) is an unripe tomato. But what of the lover (feminine)? The one who bites? The one who does the picking, and the tasting, and the tossing away?
It would be too easy to call the lover (feminine) a black widow; the metaphor is too obvious. And again, she rarely ever swallows, and tearing a chunk out of is not equivocal with devouring one’s mate. And carnal love need not mean carnage-love.
So what, then, is the lover (feminine)?
The lover (feminine) is a surgeon. With her white latex gloves and her magnifying eye and her teeth that slice like scalpels. And her sutchers, her trump card, to sew the boy together again after she discovers a disinterest in his taste. The insides never tumble out, never turn rotten, because the lover (feminine) in an act of fond cruelty can stitch the broken skin together again.
This is the lifesaving grace of the lover (feminine). She keeps the boy in one piece, but after her light turns off and her gloves are tossed away, the boy is shuffled out on a stretcher; the next victim rises to the occasion.
And the boy, though sewn together perfectly like a pair of finely tailored trousers, will never be whole again. The bite has been taken, the juices sucked out, and now he is only skin. And empty too.
But he looks whole, and that’s the biggest problem. He is ushered off the dusty ground, whisked into a colander, shuffled inside to be saved from the coming frost of winter.
And back on the vine the next summer, his skin goes red again, and the girls come running back in their knitted hats and their antique dresses. And as always, they are hungry. And he’s fallen, and they scoop him up again like a baby or a wounded bird.
And they take another bite.
But the biggest problem of love: diminishing returns.
The lover (masculine) only has so much juice that can be sucked out. His skin can only be sewn over so many times before it ruptures beyond repair.
But the lover (feminine) always has her scalpel. The women always have teeth.
And the lover (masculine) is always overripe by the time he is cupped in a woman’s hands. And he is always too messy and sticky and gooey.
Love then, is not problematic because people can’t communicate.
Love is problematic, because it is a game of doctors playing farmers. Of organ harvesters attempting agricultural harvest.
The gravest form of miscommunication is vocational.
And love as such is a dangerous circle of incompatibilities.
