In response to Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt
Prompt Word: Taste
Dear Time,
You have the strangest flavor.
When I was young, you tasted like sugar – impatient and sparkling. I gulped you down in summer vacations and licked you off birthday candles. You were syrupy, endless, and embarrassingly sweet. I thought you would always dissolve kindly on my tongue.
Then you changed. Or perhaps I did.
You began to taste like grapefruit, sharp, unapologetic, impossible to ignore. You lingered at the back of my mouth after disappointments. You arrived metallic before difficult conversations. You left the faint salt of unshed tears.
You never asked if I preferred sweetness. You seasoned me anyway.
I used to resent your bitterness. I mistook it for cruelty. But now I suspect you were marinating me, slow and deliberate. Teaching me that not everything exquisite is sugary. That dark chocolate needs patience. That coffee requires courage. That some victories sparkle like champagne but settle into something quieter – a warm, steady aftertaste of earned breath.
You taught me about acquired taste.
How solitude first felt like burnt toast – dry, unwelcome, and later became like well-brewed tea. How ambition once tasted like glitter and applause, but matured into something saltier, steadier, more sustaining. How even heartbreak, that metallic tang I wanted to spit out, softened into wisdom I would not trade back for innocence.
You have a wicked sense of humor, you know.
You let me crave things that would later exhaust me. You let me reject flavors I would someday cherish. You watched me chase sugar highs in people, in praise, in approval, and then quietly let the aftertaste teach me discernment.
And oh, that aftertaste. You are clever there. The applause fades. The room empties. The sweetness dissolves. And what remains is you.
Sometimes you taste like salt – preserving what matters, stinging where I am still tender. Sometimes you taste like hunger, reminding me I am not done wanting, not done reaching, not done becoming.
You have refined me in ways I didn’t consent to but now understand.
You have stripped my palate of excess.
You have sharpened my discernment.
You have taught me that “good taste” is not what dazzles immediately but what nourishes quietly.
I no longer fear your bitterness. I no longer chase only sugar. I have learned to sit with complexity, the dark chocolate days, the citrus mornings, the briny afternoons of effort and resilience.
If childhood was candy, adulthood is a layered meal.
And you, Time, are the chef who never repeats a recipe.
I still have a sweet tooth. I still delight in warm doughnuts and melting chocolate and the sharp surprise of grapefruit (not all at the same time, I have learned moderation). But now I understand something I did not before:
It was never about flavor alone. It was about transformation. You do not simply pass.
You ferment.
You distill.
You season.
And in doing so, you have made me, slowly, stubbornly, an acquired taste to myself.
With reluctant gratitude and a refined palate,
Me.
© Rohini 2009–2025.
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Pieces Of My Heart 