Figs

Julia Kang Rosenthal

In childhood, I was ambivalent towards summer,with its aches and its bliss. Childhood summers just always consisted of delicate neutrality, or perhaps that’s just my nostalgia talking. 

I lived in a constant state of tranquility, existing in indefinite equilibrium with all the tiny aspects of summer: air conditioning blowing the papers of an indoor arts and craft project, drawstring backpacks filled with packed lunches for miscellaneous camps, sunscreen gathering up in the drips of sweat on my forehead and in the creases behind my knees, a sticky coating of popsicle juice covering my chin-  pieces of my hair and little flecks of dirt sticking to the popsicle coating. Whether I was simply unaware it was there or I just didn’t care, the coating was an inextricable part of my day, not something external that could ruin any expectation or plan. Looking back, I don’t know how that coating didn’t cause dents in my emotions. I know it would now.. All I know is that the air felt different back then. 

It felt better. 

Now, the summer dullness is an amoeba that engulfs me. The amoeba sits on me, but often I welcome it in the thick of the incessant haze of loneliness. The amoeba lingers even when I’m indoors. The hot fog surrounds me even in a grocery shop’s frozen aisle where goosebumps cover my bare arms. I let the fog amoeba trap me each summer morning so that I trespass in bed till noon. While I lay in bed, I squirm as summer seeps through the window. The sound of chirping and the sight of green on the trees trickles me with nausea. There are children giggling and pattering on the sidewalk below. It’s often some kid outside riding on a scooter while their parent struggles to catch up. I am swallowed even further at night, when I fall asleep, and the air conditioner is so loud that I cannot hear whatever T.V. I’m trying to watch on my computer. So then, I have to sacrifice myself to a sweaty night,  in the hopes of a measly snippet of entertainment that I can consume, as I dread and anticipate the ever pungent sound of birds the next day. 

Cardinals used to hang out in our old house’s yard by my window. My dad used to garden in the late spring, summer, and early fall. But especially in summer. He still does, but just on our apartment roof and a half of it is marijuana.  But, marijuana plants aren’t as pretty as hydrangeas. The hydrangeas that formed a barricade, protecting us, hiding us in our old house,  which we moved out of when I was freshly thirteen. Back when he really used to garden. My home was a big yellow house that never ceased to repel my summer amoebas. We had a cherry tree, an apricot tree, a pear tree, a fig tree, raspberry bushes, blueberry bushes, tomato plants, bleeding hearts, honey suckles, hydrangeas, irises, tulips, daisies, and as many more as your mind can handle. My dad’s hands were always so white and dry with tiny scrapes exposing dots of red, a price dutifully paid in respect to his craft; he simply refused to wear gloves. Though that much I can understand, what’s the appeal of an activity if  you can’t feel it against your bare hands? How would you know you were ever really there at all?

The cherry tree was the most successful, but the fig tree was my favorite. Our figs were never lacking in taste even though they were often smaller than the size of an egg.  Every summer day without fail, my dad would present me with a fresh, juicy fig, holding  it out for me to bite. I would look up from whatever brain-numbing activity I set my mind upon that day, only to see a large hand, holding out a fig. I would try to bite as close to the stem as possible to eat as much as I could. As my teeth punctured through the teardrop shaped skin, my tongue met the delicious spores which added more texture to the squishiness. It was sickeningly sweet, but who doesn’t love that?  

So when I was eight years old, and autumn was arriving ( marking the end of fig season) I experienced my first intense pit of unreasonable, inconsolable  sadness. Now I am not sure why the ending of fig season never affected me the following years we lived in that house, and I am not sure why it hadn’t affected me in any years prior. All I am sure about is that that year, the sorrow hit me like your first punch, the confusion adding to the pain. I did not want my parents to know about the seemingly trivial  reasoning for my sadness ( though that didn’t make it any the less gut-wrenching), so when I was caught crying in bed, I lied, saying that my older brother and sister had been mean to me. As I cried, I envisioned a paradise world – where figs would be in season all year round. So that morning I was eager to get my father to freeze some figs so I could return to them in the winter, though  really it was more that I couldn’t possibly bear to say goodbye to them at that moment. Nevertheless he did freeze them, and it partially eased my pain knowing they were sitting there in the freezer as any lingering bits of summer dried away. 

But I never returned to them. I probably realized by then that I would have been better off eating them when they were fresh, as that would have been preferable to a bland warmed up fig that had been frozen for months. But eight year old me, at the end of summer 2013, thought a complete loss of figs might just eat her  up completely.

At that age, I could see sprouting figs on our tree, and the possibility of that melancholy, that soul- wrecking fig sadness was eased, as if it meant nothing. Though now, that pit of sorrow swims in the summer amoeba, and in the summer, that amoeba swims equally in me, and  It would swim in me even if we went back to the yellow house and my father held out endless figs for me to bite. If I stuffed myself with those figs, I would still long for them and miss them even when they sat directly in my mouth and stomach. I would still  long for a popsicle coating on my chin that crusts up in the wind that would hit my face as I ride a scooter down some rickety Brooklyn sidewalk. And the only thing that might possibly ease me is the beginning of autumn.

Even in the crowded streets, if it’s summer, the clouds of hot amoebas separate us all. They separate us even when the subway gets so crowded that you’re pressed up against the sweaty backs of four strangers and even when you don’t know yourself. Some, like younger me, think a single amoeba holds us all, one so big that you couldn’t even feel it and or know it existed. Now, nothing satisfies my cravings for a hand holding out fruit- even that exact thing.

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Julia Kang-Rosenthal is an eighteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York. Her favorite show is Broad City, her favorite movie is Little Miss Sunshine, her favorite song is Across The Universe, and her favorite book is Housekeeping. Her Instagram handle is @juliakangrosenthal.