A poem about a strange fruit basket
We make up a pretty strange fruit basket.
Different colors.
Different backgrounds.
Different interests.
Different tastes.
Well at least we’re all fruits.
Blueberry is easily likeable.
She’s vegan, but only sometimes.
Maybe 70% of the time?
She’s adventurous, and many of my favorite memories were her ideas.
She takes all the good photos for the group, and gives the best hugs.
For someone like me who grew up not used to receiving big hugs from anyone besides my parents, she’s made me better at receiving and showing love.
Persimmon is me.
I’m a sensitive softie — empathetic and a listener.
I also set high standards for myself, and so I work with my introversion to be a source of strength, not weakness.
I like to be organized, some might say too much.
I’m bad at telling jokes but I love to make others laugh, so I usually take on an odd sense of humor, though my friends have never made me feel weird about it.
Papaya to me is so funny, but she’d never claim so herself.
She would probably choose beach > mountains 9/10 times and she loves to travel, mostly for the food.
She knows all the best matcha places in Tokyo.
I’ve been friends with her the longest, and she’s seen me grow and change so much.
She usually knows the right answer to my problems, and is one of my biggest supporters.
Tomato, tomato.
She has an infectiously funny laugh, that even over Zoom it makes me crack up.
She sunburns easily and believes that drinking vodka shots will cure the common cold, but has yet to show me any proof.
I’ve learned lots about different cultures through her, and she’s challenged my beliefs about the world in ways she probably doesn’t realize.
Banana is a bit crazy.
She’s embraced her identity as the fruit, and would self-refer to herself as one of those brown, too-ripe bananas.
Probably too much caffeine, and goes to sleep at 6am.
She finds the details interesting, and points out the small things that most people would walk past — a boundless curiosity and rare attentiveness that makes the normal things feel special.
And then there was a crisis.
But crisis has caused us to reconnect.
To reach out and ask each other how we were doing —
“Are you safe?”
“Is everyone healthy?”
“I love and miss you guys, keep us in the loop!”
On paper we’re a strange combination, but we make a pretty good fruit basket.
It’s made me wonder about the other fruit baskets that exist in the world.
There must be multiple ones as strange as ours.
What fruit would you be?
What would your basket look like?
