“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”

Ernest Hemingway

Into My Mouth

Inside every fig is a story.


Not the story of a seed, but of a body.  Around 80 million years ago, fig trees and wasps made a deal. Not a fair one, not a kind one — But one that worked. And it still does. The tree gets its fruit. Ripe and ready. The wasp gets a grave. Warm and closed.  And we, unknowing, get the sweetness. Into our mouths.

One-Way Journey

The fig hides its flowers inside itself. A private garden, locked behind pulp. And only the fig wasp has the key.

Tiny. Winged. Disposable.

She crawls into the fig through a narrow opening, losing her wings in the process to lay her golden lives, and then, always, she dies. If she picks the wrong fig, the fig whose flowers aren’t ready to bear her children, she still dies.

Knight In Shining Armor

The new lives develop where their mothers broke down. They wake up and mate; a few hours later the males start crawling to dig an exit tunnel—finally, a way out. Yet, only females can fly off; the males don’t have wings and have no vision. They never see the outside and die after completing the tunnels.
While males world begin and end, the females fly off to a new fig, a new life, into the fruit that holds their children, into the same enzymes that they crawled out of.

I Give My Body

Her body breaks down, dissolved by the same enzymes that make the fig soft and sweet.

But this isn’t a horror story. Catch it at the right angle; it’s an ecological love story. It’s the story of how life works and how the fruit we crave and bear sometimes comes wrapped in death and loss.

The best flavors aren't made in sterilized kitchens but  in collapsed things that still feed something else. The natural world is one big open kitchen. 
And the fig wasp… Although you can’t see her anymore, she’s still in there.

Dead inside.
Sweet outside.

Lost Wings, Rot, and Sugar

And then there are those of us who are dead inside but full of life outside. They remind me of the fig wasp —how she walks into something dark, leaving the whole world behind where there is so much beauty and freedom, and keeps sinking into the fig anyway.

They remind me of mothers who tend their children in their breasts and roses in their garden, brave people who give pieces of themselves to make something grow: an idea, a revolution, a self. People who turn rot into something that tastes unrecognizable.