Of all life’s wild flavors, I’ve learned to savor each taste, touch, and smell, however lovely or horrid, I’d love nevertheless. There are the spices, fire burning in me, my reckless passion for adventure; challenges I can never refuse. The saccharine honey, sticky in its grace always to be eminently inspiring, to be the novelty moments I cherish; the irreplaceable memories I’ll never forget. Then there are the bittersweets, callous and murky—hazy in its stupor, its tantalizing mystery; I wouldn’t get to taste until the repercussion, chilling me to my bones bit by bit. The bittersweets have always been the most life changing, the most haunting.
I began to appreciate its cruel taste after the end of sophomore year when I learned how to be grateful. It was the bruised reality of dark flavored ferments—I learned how life was exceptionally fragile. The car accident for one, during sophomore year, the moment my mom flipped our SUV down perimeter road. I remember breathing silence, the rolling of the car far away, and the frozen road ahead glaring back at me. From waves crashing and slapping my insides, I’d be too numb to scream, too numb to hear the snaps and the crunch beneath my head. Then the violent, colourful hashes of glimpsed faces behind closed doors that I’d wake under a hot blue sky, a throbbing head to the ambulances cries and mother’s “I'm sorry, so sorry…” Her eyes like sea glass, eroded and jaded.
My sophomore year had been the most eventful, a thundering maelstrom of all different kinds of flavors. From the bittersweets, the exotic, the sour, to the succulent sugars, I’ve savored each, and by junior year I realized that I craved to feel every flavor, to breathe it in, soak it up and taste its wisdom with stretched out hands; I’ll never want anything more. To fear nothing but the tasteless normality, it had occurred to me that life was short, too short. I’ve become filled with compassion for the world: its nature, its history, its people, its cultures, and the love I’ve seen in even the darkest of places.
By senior year I found myself having affairs with words, realizing the writer in me, the artist fully bloomed, and it shaped my character indefinitely. I was inspired by the tiny moments in life I learned to be the most grateful about. The moments that came like magic, too quick to capture on film, too quick to remember—and the vivid image of time had always been ticking, never enough; I wanted to fill each minute in caramel riches, to its full sweet, sweet potential. I know life is filled with colors I’ve never seen, words I’ve never heard, like the forbidden fruit dangling just a bit out of reach. It calms me knowing its mystery will in the end unfold to me, as long as I keep chasing it.