They’re Unjuicing my Mangoes (To Each his Own).
{Photo: Couture Allure Vintage Fashion}
By Dianne Bayley.
They’re taking the music and working out the keys; talking about staves and strings and plectrums instead of magic and moves and romance.
They’re analyzing the lyrics, thinking they know what was in the writer’s heart when she penned them; shredding the sentiment in their endless search for profound meanings. They’re taking poetry a line at a time, sometimes word by word, ripping the stitching from a patchwork of prose that didn’t need unpicking .
That’s enough. Stop telling me what’s in a mango. I don’t care. I just want to feel the juice of it running from my hands down the insides of my arms; from my wrists to my elbows; with no thought of which vitamins are enjoying the journey.
Stop taking my ice cream apart… ice… cream… sugar… fat… and let me lick it slowly and watch it melt, and feel it freezing my tongue and numbing the inside of my cheeks on a stifling summer’s day. Don’t take the warmth from my freshly-baked bread with warnings of dire allergies and calamitous weight gain.
So far you have unjuiced my mangoes; you’ve stolen the delight of feeding my lover clotted cream from my lips; you’ve made the music sane and sensible, when wild and poignant was what coursed through our bodies.
You’ve robbed the dance of fervor, made us unsure of where our feet or our hands should be when the beat changes — who says it’s one-two-three? What’s to stop a blazing heart from one-two-touch-two-one-kiss?
Don’t listen to them, these mango-unjuicers. Avoid their fear-mongering in black text on bland paper and matte screens. Take back the power to savor your life; to listen to music without knowing why you should hate or love it, and dance any way you can if it moves you.
Take back the joy of sharing an apple, bite for bite, with friends. Reclaim the feel of licking the spoon before the cake is baked; stopping mid-step in a dance because you’re looking into eyes you adore. Assemble words the way you want them to be and worry not that they have no “meaning” to others.
They’re your words, your own living story.
To those who try to unjuice mangoes, I say: Enough censoring of my joy, mopping my glistening hands with bacteria-killing disposable logic. Enough telling the joyful why they should be afraid of this glorious adventure; how their food and their music and their dance is going to kill them.
Make your choices and I will honor them, but allow me to dance on untrained feet and unpaved roads with no knee-guards.
Choose fear-mongering if you must, but let the bliss-mongers among us love every last happy, delightful, dirty, ungainly, beautiful, painful, charming and wonderful bite of this one personal, uncharted journey.
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Dianne Bayley is a writer, editor and social media manager, born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work involves reading a lot of opinions online and deciphering fact from fear-mongering in “medical” and “wellness” articles. In an age of infobesity and bad news from around the globe, we must encourage small shining lights of truth and upliftment wherever we find them. You can find her at TravellingMaverick and check out her novel, Brave Lives.
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