Had I been born a pear, I would’ve lived a rotting life. Never would my fruit be peaked at its sweetness, nor its skin unspotted or my complexion original. The fleshy anatomy of a pome and the stem that pierces it resembles the useless pouch it is, barely hanging on, in vain. I’m neither the apple of your lover’s eyes nor the sleek iPhone, or its headquarters in the Big NYC. Too many a time would my skinless body be mistaken for the biblical forbidden orb, or had I been lucky enough to be the secondary ingredient to an apple pie, my rival would still reap the fame of simple delicacy, healthy and fulfilling, round and symbolic of knowledge, of death. I, on the other hand, am synonymous with fat bottoms. Weighed down by disappointment, the pear is regarded as the adjective no one wants to choose.

I am the pear, born of green – no, not the mold. The color of my bumpy skin and the desultory pimples of rusty brown are not the MAC lipstick of models and their devout young disciples. It’s not the apple red or even the cherry red, and not the banana yellow convertible, either. Even my dirt roots are represented as “Go green” symbols for corporations repossessing fame, wilting leaves the indication of elegance, and sprawled about roots the treasure of ancestry. No, I am merely the green sometimes painted on nursery walls but not vibrant enough for sports fields, or the lime purses and fresh grass, and in Japanese, the word for green is a shade of blueberry blue.

How a pear such as I retained such firm skin in the light of reluctant swinging from trees or plucking from institutionalized farmers’ hands, I know not. My brothers and sisters fell from the branches of Mother Earth but they blossomed to reject her maternal twigs. Some bruised, others spoiled, we flourished through Wal-marts and Winn-Dixie’s and Walgreens, unpicked. Lost in the masses of produce, of tea sweetener, of fruit bowls with which the pear so strikingly clashes, we survive – until. Until the pear is a bygone for time efficiency to gratify a distracted crowd; until the pear weeps for companionship and finds it within the combusting depths of dumpsters; until we rot.

It’s the pear that knows the eyes of the unwanted, the overlooked. The pear does not wish for fame or rising market demand or a shade of lipstick. Rather, I – proud of my pear-ant, the great and generous Mother Earth – wish nothing more to live out my days as a green lump. I will grow slowly and deliberately, absorbing both knowledge and daylight until the days run out, and I return home. Because I, as distinguishing in culture as that of a sapling, have remarkably swung on trees throughout history, unscathed by Earth’s new zits that grow on the surface in skyscrapers, or the dinosaur juice pumping through factories so the apple can appear as flawless as myth. I am the seventeenth century still-life, still today content with this frozen posture I uphold, the bottom stringer supporting the social ladder, the buttress to society. I fit in a human palm not through genetic engineering but through the purpose of my being there. My years of experience reign in historical significance that while the winds change, I may sway – but forever will I be of the noble pear tree family, observant, unwanted, and proud.