Being clean and pure is overrated. I’d rather stay rotten to the core, or as the others would say, “the columella”. You heard me right. Let the flavor of my words poison your taste buds. On the outside, I’m nothing but rotten and useless. Green and white sink and stain into my skin. You call me unsightly; I call this overlooked beauty. I can never get enough of how the mold sinks into my pores. The other lemons like to call themselves pure and zesty. Ironically, they fail to realize they’re just like the next lemon: sour and bitter. Try living in the basket for a day; it’s comedy. They gossip about me, telling me I’ll never be baked in doughy desserts or pastries. They tell me about the experience of becoming lemonade, squeezed with joy and patience. They tell me how freeing it is to escape their skin, only to fall into a more delicate one, a confined cup. They fail to realize the smooth skin they desire to escape protects them better than an environment that lets their juices pour out. I tell them this every time, but they love to shoot down my arguments by bragging about how they get to dance with thick, pasty sugar.
After gagging on their excitement woven within their bitter stories, they have the audacity to tell me how I’ll never experience a “metamorphosis so tranquil”. To tell you the truth, it’s all overrated. Burying myself at the bottom of the basket to avoid sticky hands is my paradise. Being rotten and unsettling is underrated. I bet you scowl at my attitude, maybe scrunch your nose or furrow your eyebrows at my rot! And I don’t care! I don’t desire freedom, and that’s the best part of being rotten to the columella.