A very close friend recently brought me some fruit. They did not seem very appetizing, but I was grateful to have them. I thought I would try one tonight, and selected one of the least attractive of the bunch. It was a sort of sickly yellow color, splotchy, and unwelcoming to the eye. As I rinsed it, I reflected that it was a living part of the earth. That it had grown on a tree. That it was a gift to me. I liked it. I developed a relationship with this piece of ugly fruit. I found a bowl for it, and brought the tools I would use to prepare it for eating, a task I ordinarily find somewhat tedious. In the semi-darkness, I balanced it in the vintage bowl and carried it into my room. The television was paused on an episode of Lie to Me, and I hit play and began to slice the grapefruit in half. As it opened, I was so overwhelmed that I shut the television off. The color. It had been hiding beneath. An incredible hue like nothing I can describe. Exquisite. Divine. A living fire unfolded in geometries within the ugly sphere. And now I began to feel really intimate with this whole situation. Not merely the fruit. No. It had spread. The ambient intimacy was contagious. Now everything began to seem really alive, connected. Somehow, opening the fruit… changed what space itself meant. Where before it was a gap between, it now became a bridge across. The color in the fruit seemed to sing in a silent dimension inside me. I loved the fruit and the tree and the sky. And as I worked to prepare it, first slicing around the periphery carefully with a sharp knife, and then tracing each side of each division within the half I was preparing, I paid very close attention to everything I could sense and feel. I am the sort of person who likes to prepare the entire half before enjoying it, so that I can be uninterrupted in my repast. I became lost, a bit, in the work, until, at last, each divider had been freed from the intervening flesh, and all the little pockets of it were just waiting to be scooped into my mouth. And then, when I tasted the first one, I realized what I should have by now thoroughly understood already. This was an extraordinary grapefruit. This… was the grapefruit of a lifetime. I couldn’t possibly enjoy such a wonder alone. Once I understood what was set before me, each bite became a solemn prayer. I made invitations to those unable to attend in person. And to these I added my deepest prayers, each in turn. And so you will know that I tell here the truth I say that to reveal or catalog them would be to sully them with attentions that have nothing to do with their purposes. But for each piece of the fruit, my fervor was inflamed, and the incredible almost candy-like sweetness of the flesh became, it seemed, more profound with each encounter. So I proceeded, until the second half was also consumed, and each shell was drained of the delicious juice therein remaining, and the two were joined in the bowl, consumed yet uncorrupted, exquisite, bloody, glorious, and, I dare say, holy.

A very close friend recently brought me some fruit. They did not seem very appetizing, but I was grateful to have them. I thought I would try one tonight, and selected one of the least attractive of the bunch. It was a sort of sickly yellow color, splotchy, and unwelcoming to the eye. As I rinsed it, I reflected that it was a living part of the earth. That it had grown on a tree. That it was a gift to me. I liked it. I developed a relationship with this piece of ugly fruit.

I found a bowl for it, and brought the tools I would use to prepare it for eating, a task I ordinarily find somewhat tedious. In the semi-darkness, I balanced it in the vintage bowl and carried it into my room. The television was paused on an episode of Lie to Me, and I hit play and began to slice the grapefruit in half.

As it opened, I was so overwhelmed that I shut the television off. The color. It had been hiding beneath. An incredible hue like nothing I can describe. Exquisite. Divine. A living fire unfolded in geometries within the ugly sphere.

And now I began to feel really intimate with this whole situation. Not merely the fruit. No. It had spread. The ambient intimacy was contagious. Now everything began to seem really alive, connected. Somehow, opening the fruit… changed what space itself meant. Where before it was a gap between, it now became a bridge across. The color in the fruit seemed to sing in a silent dimension inside me. I loved the fruit and the tree and the sky.

And as I worked to prepare it, first slicing around the periphery carefully with a sharp knife, and then tracing each side of each division within the half I was preparing, I paid very close attention to everything I could sense and feel. I am the sort of person who likes to prepare the entire half before enjoying it, so that I can be uninterrupted in my repast. I became lost, a bit, in the work, until, at last, each divider had been freed from the intervening flesh, and all the little pockets of it were just waiting to be scooped into my mouth. And then, when I tasted the first one, I realized what I should have by now thoroughly understood already.

This was an extraordinary grapefruit. This… was the grapefruit of a lifetime. I couldn’t possibly enjoy such a wonder alone. Once I understood what was set before me, each bite became a solemn prayer. I made invitations to those unable to attend in person. And to these I added my deepest prayers, each in turn. And so you will know that I tell here the truth I say that to reveal or catalog them would be to sully them with attentions that have nothing to do with their purposes. But for each piece of the fruit, my fervor was inflamed, and the incredible almost candy-like sweetness of the flesh became, it seemed, more profound with each encounter. So I proceeded, until the second half was also consumed, and each shell was drained of the delicious juice therein remaining, and the two were joined in the bowl, consumed yet uncorrupted, exquisite, bloody, glorious, and, I dare say, holy.