The Plums in the Icebox
When I read the William Carlos William poem about plums for the first time in college the theme of pleasure for pleasure’s sake above all else was resonant.
I can’t go a summer without eating a cold plum and thinking of sitting in a wooden desk with explicit carvings made by student’s past. This summer the plums, that were once ‘so sweet and so cold’, have no taste.
It feels so incredibly wrong to complain right now, and I am going to try my absolute best not to. I am fortunate, I can walk on the sunny side of the street in so many ways, but the cracks in the pavement are more present than ever before.
I am grateful to have a job, be it part-time, and I’m grateful to still be so kindly under both a supportive roof and the age of 26. The privileges of my skin, health, and socio-economic status I was born with have become more recognized by me in every second of every day, and I’ve used them to stand up for others and will continue to do so always.
Nonetheless, this summer’s plums are cold but not good enough to steal. They are not so full of pleasure, to ask for forgiveness and not permission.
I think it is okay to be sad right now even after you’ve counted your blessings. This is not where I thought I’d be at twenty-five, and it is out of my control to find a solution because life seems to be on pause.
A year ago, exactly I left my job as a journalist with grand dreams of getting a MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Northwestern University. I spent fall and winter writing, and researching, and studying, checking off little boxes.
The hope of an artist’s loft, momentum, and resonance in modernist literature propelled me. In my mind, the plums in the icebox were going to have flavor always, and I would paint the prose that depicted pleasure, that another would read at a wooden desk carved with explicit carvings made by student’s past.
When that dream was no longer, I dreamt of an apartment with salvaged furniture and youthful experiences that would led me into my older grown-up years. I even dreamt of a morning commute.
Gone; all of the dreams of days past. They’ll be found again, not to worry there, but for now they are gone. Conquering small opportunities in hope of the eventual ability to dream again, are the glaring objects in front of me; the tasteless plums.
So, I’ll put a plum in the depths of the icebox, and save it for breakfast, a time in the distant future, and know that future me will give a fulfilling apology for the moments of today because the plums will be ‘so cold, and so good.’
