Okay, so here’s the thing with how I feel about you.
Okay, so here’s the thing with how I feel about you. It’s kinda like finding an old penny on the ground when I was a kid. It was all brown and discolored as time and tire treads left their marks on it, but I just wanted to stick it into my mouth and suck the taste off it.
Maybe that’s a little gross, maybe that’s a lot gross, but it makes sense to me ‘cause those pennies just had this mesmerizing menagerie of flavors. There was the sour bitterness of experience that wrestled with my tongue and caused me to flinch at its potency. Then came a mysterious sweetness buried underneath that was compelling because it was so freakin’ inexplicable. Beneath it all, as I turned the penny over and over in my mouth, was this firm resoluteness. It was the unyielding ideal of what it meant to be a penny: ageless, purposeful, and, at its core, untouched by the dirty hands of a cruel world. Regardless of the grime that the penny collected over the years, no matter how many fingers had rubbed over it, the face endured.
I also knew that if I sent the penny back into the world and it, one day, returned to my hand, I would get just as much pleasure sucking away at all the adventures and misadventures that penny had experienced since last we’d met. And, after my hungry tongue made the penny young again, I would be rewarded with a bright, shiny face that gushed the warm, smooth, metallic taste of forever.
Yeah, that’s how I feel about you.
- Charles Martin & Will Weinke
