I have been cutting persimmons, but they do not grow here, not anywhere near here… deep orange life lies in their centers, having migrated from Japan. They followed half my ancestry and we are now plucked together in the winter in the state of New York, and I’m going to eat them, each one, I’m going swallow them slice by slice and taste their nectar and consume their vitamins. I’m going to digest them, these ancient few, which matured over millennia into something sweet.

These persimmons, you know, are older than I. For half a human life no sweet fruit grow from the persimmon tree – for half a human life the persimmon tree has to wait to sweeten. Its fruit wait as seeds, as minerals, as mere potentials – and how patient they must be, waiting in the earth, or in the rain, in the clouds, in the waste of others, in the blood of animals… somewhere in my cat, when I buried him a few months ago, there must have been a sweet persimmon or two that was ready to move on.

And even as I wonder I know I’ve lost track entirely of what persimmons these are I have cut – which slice belonged to which persimmon. I can make up only jigsaws in my mind, which fail in every meaningful sense to make a persimmon from the slice. I’ve done it now—twenty-four years of a sometimes hungry man, pulling apart the persimmon. I’m no longer sure I could say what any single one of them looked like, whether one was darker than the rest, or whether one was splotchy. And now these pieces are suddenly persimmonless; after so many years—who knows how many (certainly not I)—of growing into a persimmon, these persimmonless persimmons are now something else. Immutably, something else. How presumptuously I made it so. Though I can’t even catch myself in the flux. I’ll swallow these persimmonless fruit and they’ll bring their story with them, and I’ll have grown older. How long it will then have been for me to finally become this persimmony.

We are, after all, quite persimmony. And somewhere in me already I’m sure is a sweet persimmon that is ready to move on. It will have such a long journey. Perhaps it’s in my bowels now and I could speed it along! I would prefer that, at least, to it waiting in my blood. Though it, having no more persimmonness than anything else in me, is no less me. I suppose there are parts of me all ready for a long journey beyond. Beyond this, whatever it is, as it dances out of my grasp. Beyond my persimmony fingers and persimmony mind. Beyond an imperceptible flash of the universe that comes from I know not what. I am here, covered in words, but where has the persimmon gone? When I find it, everything will have been forgotten. It will be there in place of me and it will grow from a limb at least half a human life old, and then even a single pang of pain in my stomach from back then, even an unwitnessed blink of my eye from the past, will express itself. It will make nectar drip onto a wet bough and soft scents sweep over a child’s nostril. It will make itself fall, eventually, when the time is ripe. And someone, perhaps, if we do not give up the potential of undefiled reality, will see my heart in its deep orange life and be grateful that I died.