I Was Crystalline Sugar, You Were Just a Foolish Boy With an Apron

I should have never let you plunge your novice hands into my depths.

Photo by micheile dot com on Unsplash.

Before you reduced me to this sticky, dense, messy version of myself, I was delicate sugar — raw, featherlight, crystalline in composition, glistening, and free-flowing.

You fell in love with the way you could run your fingers through a sea of minuscule rocks so tiny that you felt nothing but silky smoothness. How you could dip a spoon into my depths and pull up enough sweetness to dissolve your bitterness. How you could watch those tiny granules shift and morph in waves around whatever plunged into their depths. How those same tiny granules melted into pleasure on your tongue.

Your eyes opened wide with that pleasure, and you salivated at the idea of what you could do with me.

It made you greedy.

You wanted more than just sugar, you wanted candy — smooth, slick, firm, processed, perfected — packaged neatly in crisp wrappers, ready to be consumed, but only after being made exactly to your liking.

You donned an apron and called yourself the confectioner, but you never took the time to learn. What you wanted was perfect alchemy — the kind that takes diligence, devotion, and precision to achieve…