On citrus in the winter

I can't stop eating pomelo

I’ve been known to eat an entire pomelo in a sitting. It’s more impressive when you learn that it’s the largest citrus variety, though depending on scale, citrus could come to describe things big and small. I heard someone on a podcast comment that tumors are always described in terms of lemons, limes, and oranges. You might not want a pomelo then. On the other hand, they are a Lunar New Year centerpiece, symbolizing prosperity and abundance. Big and small, but always significant.

They come to our grocery shelves in the dark winter from a place brighter than here. I’ve never seen a pomelo tree in person, though it grows where I’m from. I imagine gathering the fruit from sagging branches, and instead pick one up from the stacked fruit display. Its ripe juices have blistered at the base, and I smell its tartness through the skin. Later, on my cutting board, it looks human in there.

I want pomelo when it’s cold outside, like I want to eat its sunshine. I used to get out of bed craving pomelo. My knife cut away at its foamy flesh before the meek, northeastern sunrise, because I was too impatient to use my thumbs, or to wait any longer to have my fix. This was a time when citrus came before toothpaste, though I would have eaten it after brushing, even if it made my mouth bitter and rubbery. Then came a time when Zoloft came before my toothpaste, maybe because it was cold outside, and I wanted sunshine. Zoloft, toothpaste, pomelo; Zoloft, toothpaste, pomelo.

I was shopping at Costco (where everything is oversized) with my mom in San Francisco (where winter never truly arrives). Five pomelos came together in a giant net the way little tangerines do, and I hauled one into our shopping cart the way a fisherman brings in a catch. “You’re never going to eat all that,” she dared me. At home, she put them in our wooden fruit bowl, and they gripped one another comically, trying not to spill onto the counter top. In five days, the fifth pomelo was split open by the time mom came down for breakfast. She fed herself a piece and admitted she was wrong, that I could eat them all. The sun was coming through the window, and I admitted that they weren’t that good. “They’re not sweet.” She stood next to me and we peeled and ate in silence.

In a Dietetics for Disease class, I learned that you can’t eat grapefruit when you’re on statins, cholesterol medication.
"Why?” asked a classmate. It was too complex to get into during class. “Just remember no grapefruit for patients with heart disease.”

But pomelo is not grapefruit. Grapefruits are ruby and stiff. A performative citrus for garlands, Palomas, William Sonoma kitchen towels. You peel its skin away and it spits onto your chin and clothes, and its unwelcoming fruit clings to the rind like it doesn’t want to be eaten, only imagined. Pomelo, on the other hand, and its fat pith and dewy pulp, opens itself so tenderly. When it comes apart in segments, it makes me miss my mom, because that’s how she peels my fruit, patiently.

My mom was the one who read the medication guidelines left in the Walgreens bag by my sink at home, almost three thousand miles away. She called me on FaceTime to tell me that pomelo was joined by lithium and ibuprofen under Zoloft contraindications. I was so dismayed.

I supposed mine was a sickness of the heart. When I woke up there wasn’t much I looked forward to— weightless days, heavy nights— besides my morning fruit.

I cried on Telehealth to Rachel, my psychiatrist, while she wrangled her four foster huskies behind the camera. My tears were fatter, juicier than each bite of pulp. I told her between gulps of air how all I want is my pomelo, and if I can’t have it, then I don’t want what’s on the bottom of my pill bottle. A cat climbed into her lap as Rachel did a quick scan of WebMD. “The effects are negligible. You can have your fruit.”

It’s such an impressive fruit, to render futile amphetamines, blood thinners, anti-inflammatories, and to lighten my seasonal depression when the next best thing wasn’t SSRIs, but moving home. I’m curious and I google the mechanism, then promptly agree with my dietetics professor that it’s too complicated to understand. It’s not for me to ‘get.’ What do I understand is more base than that. It’s the compulsion to bring my fingers to my lips for two pounds of flesh. It’s to spit out the seeds and wipe my chin with the back of my hand. It’s to feel in my body, yet to imagine the hands that picked and peeled the fruit as if they were not mine, and to taste sunshine, and to think of my mom.