Suppose you exit the parking structure at Westfield UTC in San Diego and walk towards the open-air atrocity, filled with more options for oatmilk matcha lattes than are good for your sanity. In that case, the first thing you will see is one of the two Lululemon locations in the mall (really?).
Ignore it, turn right.
Not far away, a pink circular sign waves from the wall, the silhouette of a man in a newsboy cap looming over a cup of coffee, offering “Joe & The Juice.” The interior of the shop is on the darker side, a similar atmosphere to that millennial-run burger joint that serves its overpriced truffle fries on fake newspapers. The menu offers smoothies and juices whose names give you not a single hint of what you are ordering, except maybe the color of the beverage. This leaves the cashiers entertained as the queue of squinting customers try to read the ingredients in tiny print under names like “Iron Man” and “Prince of Green,” their eyes occasionally widening at the right side of the menu.
On the walls are framed quirky posters like “I just saved some wine, it was trapped in a bottle” and “more espresso, less depresso.” One of the many posters humorously comments on the human encounter with avocados: “too soon… too soon… too soon… NOW too late…”, referring to the universal pain of finding your morning avocado, which you’ve been looking forward to all night, disturbingly squishy—even though you could’ve sworn attempting to cut it yesterday afternoon almost chipped the knife.
On my left wrist, there is a permanent white band, a mark left by the joint effort of the sun and my Casio Baby-G that mom got me when I turned twelve. Its watch band is now off-white from the five years of weathering, with faint, darker spots on it from that one time I helped my mom dye her grey streaks black.
That avocado on the poster from Joe & The Juice seems to have gotten itself a little too acquainted with my watch. Every tick of a handle, every tock of the gears, seems to smear that damned fruit into every uncleanable crevice of the machine. The rose gold watch face and its hidden surfaces are painted with a filthy green explosion of nostalgia, filling every unoccupied moment with the remnants of something that used to promise a great avocado toast.
So unruly this fruit that its colors seem to bleed onto nostalgia itself, contaminating it with its bad habit of causing untimeliness.
Nostalgia is the only word a writer can really put on it.
The persistent state of “missing.”
The endless cycle of living in the past and the future, but somehow never the present. You look forward to something about to happen, forgetting to look at the ground at your feet. You pick up an avocado hoping to make guacamole, only to find it hard as a rock with anticipation for tomorrow’s day, not quite fit for making guac, so you leave it in the fridge. That same afternoon, you return to it with the new idea of slicing it and putting it on toast, only to find it has become too mushy to be sliced, so you leave it on the counter. The next day, you return to it to finally cut it open, and find that it is too mushy for anything at all, with dark spots crawling on the light green flesh.
So then perhaps the mythical “prime” of this devilish fruit doesn’t exist, the “present” an elusive thing before it becomes nostalgia.
I want a perpetually solid avocado to fulfill all of my slicing needs, and another forever mushy one for on-demand guacamole.
I know I can’t have that. They haven’t even made GMO avocados that do that yet.
So what then?
So what if you’re looking forward to something that’s yet to happen? Something is happening right now for you to miss later. So what if I lost my watch the first month of my freshman year in college? Its reliable mechanics have gotten me this far, and I have nothing but good memories and a sweet few chapters of my story with its rosy reflection glimmering on it. So what if something has already happened and you feel sickening butterflies upon its absence? At least you once had something beautiful enough to cause this colorful affliction.
So what if my guacamole is a little chunky because the fruit was unripe?
So what if my order of avocado toast is a little mushy because the fruit was too ripe?
Before it gets rotten and you have to trash it six feet under, eat your avocados.
Sole Magazine