The Impermanence of Mangoes
For me, the return of mangoes in the grocery store signals the start of spring, just as much as the equinox and the flourish of flowering trees. During the summer after my first year in grad school, I met a guy who had just graduated from the university where I was studying. On our second date, we prepared a variety of snacks in my apartment for a picnic. One of the items he’d brought with him was a fresh mango, which I’d never had. He cut it up for me to taste. It was delicious - light, sweet, juicy. There was almost a creaminess to its texture. We added it to our stash of vittles.
At the end of the summer, he moved out of the U.S. for a job. After he left, I bought a mango for myself at the grocery store and cut it up in my kitchen, where two months before we’d puttered around gathering provisions. The end-of-summer mango was juiceless and stringy, a disappointment. For some non-purposeful reason, I simply never ate a mango again until 2022. It was as though I had forgotten they existed - after all, they’re not one of those fruits that live in the grocery store year-round. Then I came across a display of them in a Massachusetts grocery store. I hovered there for a few seconds, looking at the pile of golden ovals, thinking about summer 2007 in Ohio. I picked up a few to test out their softness and tentatively added one to my basket.
This first mango after so many mango-less years did not disappoint. I began buying them every week - they were cheap ($1 each) and always tasted like I remembered them from that first time in Ohio. Memories of my first mango have now been replaced with memories of my first short-lived spring in Massachusetts: peeling the fruit with a knife on the flimsy plastic cutting board in my extremely-dated Airbnb kitchen. Adjusting to a completely-different day-to-day life than I’d had for the previous 12 years: numerous close friends nearby. The discovery of a new favorite coffee shop. The 30-minute ride on the Green Line from my Airbnb to my job at the wine shop. The 9:30 p.m. ride back to the suburb of Boston where I was staying, after which I’d walk Livvie down the tree-lined suburban street. The frustration, anxiety, and lack of success in trying to find a dog-friendly apartment to move into by the end of April.
A couple of weeks before my Airbnb stay was scheduled to end, I found a shared apartment to move into in May… and then it fell through, three days before I was scheduled to move in. Heartbroken, I left Massachusetts for my hometown and then returned almost exactly a year later. My first relocation to New England, like my relationship with the Ohio guy, lasted less than 2 months. Mangoes, in their transience, seem a fitting reminder of relationships, homes, experiences, that are all the more poignant for their brevity.
This poem I wrote was originally published in volume #6 of Noctua Review.
Mangoes After you left, you called from Mexico. You'd "had the best mango," and it had made you think of me. The first time I tasted one was with you – sunshine-yellow cubes, sweet juice dripping down my wrist, mixed with pineapple and watermelon that I pushed to the side. Every week that summer I explored the produce section at the grocery store, imagined living in a place where I could eat mangoes, tangerines, papayas, year-round; where fruit was eternally fresh – not like the mango I bought myself in September, bringing it home to peel in my empty kitchen, its flesh peeling apart in strings, juiceless, not fit to pair with any other fruit.