Perfection Revisited...

The fiction piece I just posted, Perfection, was inspired by a memory.

I was texting with a friend of mine from high school a few days ago.

Wait, let me correct that, someone I'm friends with now that went to my high school. Cami and I were not friends in high school. She was gorgeous and talented and modern and confident and had dated Brent so of course I couldn't stand her. If you were to ask me why I didn't care for her I would not have ever said it was jealousy, and I'm not sure I really even understood at the time that that is what it was, I would have just said something about her bugs me.

Which, let's be totally honest, something about EVERYBODY bugged me at the time. I was the walking definition of hurt people hurt people. Until I got past my own wounds I was not all that great to be around. Intimidating. Intense. Scary as fuck. All of those things had been used to describe me.

But we went to high school together. We were in theater together. And we did a one act play senior year that I only remember two things about. One was there was a line about Shangri La. Now my brother always said Shangri Li. And as my brother was the smartest person I knew I had no doubt at all that he was right and it was a misprint in the script (he was not right). Because I had no doubt and because I was used to being right (but not this time) I full throated announced to our little group that it was wrong and we should change it.

Being right more than I was wrong, again, sounds cocky but I was pretty smart, I was Tyrion Lannister, I drank and knew things, when I announced this was the way everyone changed it. Good.

The next day in class Cami came back in and said her dad had told her than no, Shangri La was correct (he, of course, was right). And Cami's dad is also incredibly smart. So we had the battle of the brother versus the father. The group decided to go back to Shangri La (which was, again, right) and we did it that way. The whole time with me thinking, this is wrong and we are going to look stupid. Which, of course we would have looked stupid if we had gone with what I thought.

Years later my brother said Shangri Li about something and I asked him why he used that when it was Shangri La. (I had, of course, looked it up in the library when it seemed nobody was going to correct our misuse, which was of course not a misuse) He told me paradise was a lie so he always referred to it that way as a joke. Motherfucker...

ANYWAY...I always remembered that as a lesson in even if you are POSITIVE you are right and even if your favorite source makes it seems like you are right, double check that shit.

The other piece I remember about the play was it a post apocalyptic thing and it featured a strawberry. (Now, I'm going to be honest here, it might not have been a strawberry. It might have been a different small fruit, but in my head it's stuck as a strawberry) And this group of women, I think it might have been a book club, anyway this group of women, the hostess brings out a single strawberry on a plate. Just one. It's small and it's real and they have to share it. I think it was bought on the black market. It's a risk to even have it.

For some reason that image of the single strawberry has stuck in my head for decades. I think about it every year during strawberry season. What it would be like for fruit to be that precious. And then this year we bought a pack of strawberries at the store that were the most beautiful terrible berries we'd ever had. They were large and red and gorgeous and tasted like nothing. The texture was firm to the point of being almost apple like. It was like biting into a Red Delicious apple and finding out that only half of the name is accurate.

They are doing a lot of breeding with fruit to make it more shelf stable. More shippable. And some of that is great. And some of it is terrible.

So as I texted with Cami and I thought about our one act play and I thought about those terrible strawberries I thought, let me revisit it.

And again, it's Shangri La. Even if paradise is a lie.