February 29

Replace Peach With Human

A peach is a lot like a person. Peaches are solid, surrounded by flesh, consisting of a stone hard core in the middle. A peach can be ripe or rotten. It can be sweet or bitter, sour. It can be both, all four, or neither. A peach can be big. A peach can be small. A peach can be new and full of life, or dead and shriveled. Peaches are born, they grow, they are tended to and fed and nurtured. They are cut from their homes and transported to different places. They are displayed and judged, picked up. And always, eventually, they die.

They always die.

Peaches and humans are a lot alike. Peaches are seen to be as good as the exterior is: sweet, delicious flesh earns a good reputation, while bitter, sour flesh earns a bad. Over time, it is stripped of its beautiful flesh, exposing what lies inside. Life and fate wears away at it, layer upon layer, chunk upon chunk is torn off until nothing remains but the core, the source of all life, the driving force that allowed it to thrive.

The Aura loved peaches.

The core - or soul, if you will - of a peach seems to be rendered completely useless after the flesh dies. With no vessel, all it is is a round core, one that contributes to nothing, that does nothing. A weakling idiot will claim that the soul travels to a place known as heaven (or hell). A useless being would hold on to the thought that some guardian angel would escort them to the promised land, some fabled area where everything was happy and right. The Aura believed or, rather, knew that this was not true. A peach didn't go anywhere but his waiting jaws. A soul without the flesh was just another futile, useless peach.

And the Aura loved peaches. Core and all, no escape for either the flesh or the core. I loved peaches the exact same way, for the exact same reason. We were one in the same, weren't we?

But the Aura was everything but foolish, and it knew to never indulge in something as subjective and superficial as taste. Even though, he always would tell me that no one peach tasted the same. No degree of sweetness was exact. Sometimes they were beautiful, perfect in flesh, but yielded sour and distasteful taste. Sometimes the ugly peach was the most delicious. Sometimes, rarely, you would eat a peach that was equal in beauty and taste.

Basically, no peach was the same, no matter how similar in taste or appearance. Wildly dissimilar. Extremely variant.

In fact, the Aura always says that the only thing similar with all peaches was the hard, stone cold core, so mercilessly solid and selfish, right in the middle.