There are mangoes now. There always have been, of course—just because something stops tasting good doesn’t mean it stops growing—but there are mangoes again. There are mangoes, and there is the cerulean sky, and there is sweet, sticky amber coating my palms and racing toward my elbows. 

In the winter, they grow Crayola yellow and tough, the sour bite of them only giving way to pursed lips and disappointment. They are cut and packaged and set out alongside the rest of the fruit, but they are passed over, left to rot long before they could be of use. 

Come May, come June, though, the seas of pavement part and make way for milk crates and beach-sized umbrellas. There are mangoes, true, honest to god mangoes. The sun tilts its yawning head upwards just an inch more, and I fill my pockets with crumpled dollar bills, hoping to find an avalanche of fresh fruit waiting for me. There are mangoes for sale now, and I buy as many as I can. I tear into them the way I would as a child, eager for something sweet and left with nothing to do but labor with my hands and my hands alone, digging every shred of orange from the green skin. I tear into them breathlessly, forgoing any concern for neatness, or decorum, or even simply the foresight necessary to realize that in two short minutes, I will be left sitting on the train with nothing but a pile of torn-apart peels and syrupy hands, no way to wash away the juice. 

 I tear into them like they are all I can eat—they just may be—like there are riches beyond reason to be found underneath that first sliver of skin. I tear them apart, and I bite and claw and grin, nectar circling my lips and flowing like streams in my palms. I tear them apart and I am left with my hands, resting on my lap, fingers curled upward and apart, any movement a reminder of the sugary glue between them. I find joy in this as any—in the ritual of it, the routine wildness with which I consume them. I find joy in how simple it can all be, joy in the man in the coffee shop who smiles at me, my hands laden with orange specks, and joy in how he says his aftermath looks just the same. I find joy in how I bite into them like people conquer apples, but there is no satisfying crunch; there is only the tender collapse of soft fruit and the way she looks at me as I eat, her eyes swirling with affection and bafflement. And there is the way she holds her pocket knife in her teeth as she cuts slices for us to share, diligently and focused and (though I’d never admit it to her) neater. We indulge in reckless abandon, sitting on day-lit train platforms and running our teeth over each section of mango skin, careful not to let any go to waste. We attack the streets, her hand in mine, stopping only when we reduce our bounty to scraps and are left to hunt down more, each fruit stand an exploration and a challenge: there is a best mango here, and it is ours to discover. 

And there is the specter of winter, sitting on the horizon line behind us, never fully out of sight. Winter, tough and bitter, sweetness a lie we tell ourselves to make it out the door on time. There were pale yellow months, sour and incessantly punctuated with thoughts of: “Maybe this time. Maybe this time, I will go to the store and I will call home. I will buy mangoes, tender and delicious and everything I know they cannot be.” And there were tart phone calls and too-expensive fruit, forced conversations and souring hopes. There were gray unforgiving skies, and there was the facade of it, the grocery store promise of freshness and the too-well-known truth that all things lose their seasons.

But the days are longer now, and the mangoes taste how they did when I was young, when the divide between the rainbow fruit and my hands felt unbreachable, each purchase impossibility and surprise. They taste how they did when they were projects, a way to occupy the hungry and boredom-prone child I would become in the empty summer months. There are mangoes now, a dollar a piece, and they taste like the ones I dreamed of in January, in March—the ones I was sure could be found, if I dug through the stacks of pale slices, tough and unripe and held in plastic. It is summer, and there are mangoes to be eaten, fruit to be had on sidewalks, on train platforms, on honeyed evenings where the air is glass-thin and humming. There are mangoes now, and she feasts with me, two fruit-crazed vagabonds hunting for the next reason to avoid the train ride home. There are mangoes now, and I know they cannot be here forever—winter will come as surely as all seasons do—but my hands are syrupy, and I sneak one into her bag, and I breathe in the summer mist. What more could I ask for? There are mangoes. And they are everywhere.

max greenhill (he/him) is a student at vassar college. when he’s not writing poetry instead of doing homework, he spends his time hiking, doing carpentry, and singing too loudly in the car.