DESK PEACH | Nivedita Gunturi
A peach from the farmer’s market sits on the corner of my desk.
Has it been two weeks since the day we walked hand-in-hand between the fruit stands?
I rolled a tomato leaf between my fingers that day and when I held my hand to your nose you smiled that peculiar smile of yours and laughed. Now a sticky substance seeps out of the peach onto the wood, the sickly sweet of it in my nostrils.
I love peaches. You know that.
Michigan, you told me. Michigan has the best peaches. I thought of the weekend we spent by the lake, eating kettle corn in the sand, racing up the dunes.
Does Michigan also have the best promises?
The desk peach has a layer of gray fuzz, splotchy like a bad rash, both gruesomely alive and moribund in its spread.
Come sit with me, you said, the day we bought the peaches. Put the groceries away later. I sat next to you, watching the Brownian motion of the dust in the air, directionless like me now.
Was it later that day or the next that you told me I looked fuzzy, like you still had lake water in your goggles when you looked at me?
The heady scent of the lilacs is what I remember most about the moment I found you on the floor of the garage. I looked for the rise and fall of your chest. I knelt there beside your long arms, the ones that changed the living room light bulb the day before. Passersby peered in through the open garage door, the whispering like the insistent rustle of the leaves of the black walnut tree that looms over our house. I never knew that nothing grows in the roots of a black walnut. Not until you showed me the dead soil in its webbed toes.
And now — the medical team tells me you may not come home. What is that, anyway? Medical team. They say it like they’re playing flag football. Or maybe synchronized swimming. Putting on a big show but going nowhere. Will our life come back like the wild strawberries growing under the clematis? Or is it a tiny seedling under the black walnut, dead on arrival?
The peach hardly looks like a peach now. The sticky fluid has congealed and I think I might see tiny larvae squeezing in and out of what’s left of the skin.
It was just two weeks ago that we walked hand in hand between the fruit stands at the farmer’s market.
A space-occupying lesion, they told me. Apparently, there’s something growing in your brain. Space-occupying lesion. What a strange thing to say. Doesn’t everything occupy space? Every feeling and tear and breath? You? And me?
The peach is shriveling. It’s not taking up much space anymore. The putrid smell of it is always in my face now. I notice it every time I sit at the desk to answer the phone when the ‘team’ calls. They call again. It’s time, they say.
I pick up the peach and aim. I listen for the sound of it falling heavily in the trash can as I leave the room and close the door behind me.
Nivedita Gunturi is an academic geriatric medicine and palliative care physician in Chicago, Illinois. She has a particular interest in the intersection of narrative medicine education, encouraging emotional and intellectual vulnerability between educator and learner, and a rejuvenation of the human connection during the clinical encounter. Her work as fellowship program director at Rush University Geriatric Medicine incorporates these themes, encouraging a transformative experience for her learners.