Today I Fucked Up

let me start off by saying that this FU is the culmination of years of stupidity, but the full impact of it only hit me this morning as I stood in the kitchen, scrubbing my hands and face like my life depended on it, after eating one (1) mango.

I live in the US, and, up until five years ago, had never really cared for mangoes, the big green and red ones you get at the grocery store. they were too fibrous and had this astringent undertone to the taste that I really didn't like. I would grudgingly tolerate them in a fruit salad or whatever, but I never sought them out or ordered any food or drink that was mango-flavored.

then one day in May 2017 I heard about this variety of mango called an Ataúlfo, only really available in the late spring and early summer. apparently they were delicious. I had my doubts, but I found out Trader Joe's was selling them, so off I went and bought a couple of these little golden hook-shaped fruits, just to see. and holy shit. it was like drinking the nectar of the gods. I had never tasted a fruit so sublime in my entire life. I went to the store and bought six more and ate them all over the next two days, standing over the sink with juice running down to my elbows like a barbarian.

the next year, when May rolled around, I bought seven Ataúlfo mangoes. the year after that I bought nine. every time, I ate them all within no more than 72 hours, and every time, it was a mango bacchanal. I would slice the mango halves off of the central pit, gnaw them right out of the skin, and then gnaw my way around the pit, too, scraping it with my teeth just to get it all. my face, hands, and shirt would be sticky with mango juice. there was nothing better in the whole world, and I had started looking forward to it every spring like a ritual. I'd never loved nor craved a fruit this much.

the third year, though, something a little weird happened. the day after eating the mangoes, the corners of my mouth were red, cracked, and painful. I freaked myself out wondering if I had a fungal infection or something before remembering that I had just eaten nine mangoes. probably that much fruit juice had irritated my mouth a bit, or something. I shrugged it off.

last year I bought four mangoes. gonna take it a little more easy this time around, I thought. I ate three of them - the fourth one wasn't quite ripe yet. and I woke up the next morning with the entire surface of my lips covered in tiny, fluid-filled blisters that burst with the slightest bit of lip movement and itched like the devil himself had sent an army of mosquitoes to kiss me directly on the mouth in my sleep.

I was in agony. I could barely sleep the rest of that week. the blisters itched so bad that I wanted to tear my lips off with my fingernails, they left a sticky crusty liquid behind when they inevitably burst, and new ones kept forming where the old ones had been. I tried Chapstick, Vaseline, even hydrocortisone directly to the lips in an act of desperation. finally I resorted to Benadryl just so I could knock myself out enough to get a few hours of sleep at night.

it had to have been the mangoes. I got on the internet and learned, to my horror, that mango skins and pits have the same oil - urushiol - that makes poison ivy do its terrible, terrible thing. and my dad's side of the family has always had bad reactions to poison ivy.

I'd never encountered poison ivy myself, or thought I never had. but I'd been encountering the skin and peel of mangoes, enthusiastically, with my lips, for the past four years. I had been slowly sensitizing myself to urushiol. every year. and now it had come back to bite me in the ass. my theory was corroborated later that summer when I went for a walk in some overgrown woods, and the next day had a blistering, painful, itching, oozing rash the size of a half-dollar coin on my ankle, that took two weeks to go away.

but the mangoes were so good. how could I give up the mangoes? how could I have discovered something so perfect, so beautiful, only to have it cruelly snatched away from me after only four years? how could I spend the rest of my life mourning what I had known and loved so briefly and then lost?