Why I'm Quitting Avocados

I work in a public art gallery, so I’m surrounded by beauty and confusion in one their fiercest battlegrounds.

Museums, like hospitals, are glorious, messy and abrupt places. People are at their most demanding and raw.

Sometimes, for my allotted lunch, I’ll stuff my lanyard in my pocket and take a walk, to see other people see things. It’s the quickest method I’ve found of ‘getting out of my own head’ and dissolving into the lives of others. Often, I wear my black blazer with matching pants to blend in more successfully with the security guards. Something about black in an art gallery renders you mostly invisible. But still, I carry an earpiece I was given as a prop once in my jacket pocket, just in case.

Today, I stood and watched a film about avocados with about 40 other people. There were two small bench seats available, or a harden wooden floor. As in busses, trains and other public theatres, we all adjudicated silently as to whom amongst us was entitled to the seats.

The younger and taller of us floated naturally to the back of the room, content with standing and listening to the scratchy interruptions of the real security guard’s radio as penance for our natural heigh advantage. Once we were out of the picture, and with no walking frames in sight, anyone over 50 was left to debate how much they needed the moment of rest, or if they could wait for their impending coffee and cake in the downstairs cafe after all this was over. Brows furrowed. Hands were wrung.

Eventually, we all took our acceptable seats. Mine was firmly against the back wall, shifting side to side to avoid fluid retention in my legs. Almost as soon as the film began, an older couple shuffled in to the room. Immediately, a flurry of apologies and wide-armed gestures erupted around them, as we all performed our renditions of citizenship. Please, after you. Would you like to sit down? We were just leaving, here you are.

The woman was small and brassy, with half of her denim jacket sagging with the weight of an enormous yellow badge that read “WAGE PEACE”. At first, I read it as a union cry that made me remember how little I was being paid to be here, and decided to stay watching the film a little longer past my break time. Wearing a surgical-grade mask around a greying but stoic haircut, she accepted the apologetic gap that had been left for her on the bench.

Sitting, she pulled a jurassic iPhone 5 out of the exquisite leather shoulder bag that all women of her age and politics seem to have. She turned to her husband, who stood martyrly behind her, hands clasped behind his back and shifting his weight between his feet. He nodded quickly towards the exit, as if to say “Bit busy, don’t you think?”. He seemed to remind her of the scones agreement they’d made in the kitchen earlier than morning, and that he was entitled to some. Instead of succumbing to his stomach, she instead ignored him entirely, pointed animatedly at the screen and wheeled back around to the screen. She gasped.

On the screen, a glittering cloud of Monarch butterflies soared through the Mexican rainforest. Immediately, the woman dredged her ancient iPhone from her lap, pointed it at the screen, zoomed in to an inordinate degree, and pressed record. Or so she thought. From where I was standing, legs suddenly thick and rooted like deep wooded trunks, I could see that she had not actually pressed record. In fact, it was only when she put her phone back down in her lap, that she began filming anything at all. This went on for some time, every time the butterflies came back onto screen. Oh! She exalted. Look! And promptly record nothing but her brown slacks.

The millennial urge to intervene in this misuse of technology was almost overwhelming, but so was my desire to continue observing undetected. I imagined the conversation when she got home and realised she has a good 10-12 minutes of textured nylon and none of the brilliant butterflies. She’d tell her daughter, who knows texting is too much of a task for her parents, and so calls them with the smallest things. She’d tried to get them on to using Siri to dictate messages, but that ended in disaster. Via Siri, they accidentally sent such rude and garbled messages, she had disabled the function on both their phones quietly at Christmas.

“I wonder why they got rid of that Susie” her father would sometimes ponder. “She was listening to people’s conversations, I bet”. Her mother would wager. “Bet they wished they had her during the Cold War” and they would laugh.

Here, in this small side room in the art gallery, watching their whole lives, and his hunger for a hot flat white play out in the distance between them, I wondered why they had come here this afternoon.

People mostly attend the art gallery to confirm something about themselves. If they bring their kid to an interactive exhibition, they’re good parents. If they peruse a dimly lit room pasted in Rembrandts, they’re cultured, and if they bring a friend who’s visiting town, they’re the perfect hosts. Here we were watching a documentary about the impact of avocado overconsumption on Mexican butterflies. What part of themselves did they see in it? “Mmm”-ing” at the beauty of the forest and shaking our heads at its destruction, we were all proving to each other that we cared. That we recognised the beauty of imminent extinction, and that our eyes would indeed brim with tears if the next shot was of a man knee-deep in dead butterflies. Which it was.

We were here to tempt our hearts to start. And if they didn’t here, in the presence of butterflies in the art gallery, they probably wouldn’t again.

Bowing her head to finger a tear away, WAGE PEACE finally noticed her phone was recording her lap, and swatted it away like it had just revealed itself as some kind of pervert. A handheld portable creep that she paid for monthly. I didn’t disagree with her. After a few moments, she picked it back up and petted it like a child. She wasn’t mad, she was disappointed, and it was time to leave. Hungry Husband clicked his restless heels with joy, and they left, leaving another moral spot on the bench seat to be jostled for. But nobody sat. Because we had all started to listen.

There’s a man covered in butterflies looking at us down the barrel of the camera.

We must save the butterflies, he says.

They’re clearing the forest to plant avocados, but we need the forest. There are things that need it.

I look around me. A clean shaven couple wearing cologne and expensive watches. A sweet-faced girl in her airline hostess uniform. A man in a jagged jacket and thick silver rings. All the spoils of the efforts they’ve made to be here today, to be seen, to be something.

We are all just passing through, the butterfly man continues.

And so we are.

The gallery closes at 5pm. We’ll all amble out and onto the streets, slide into cars and onto trains, and squeeze into too-small apartments. None of those things belong to us. Not really. All of these jewels – houses, jobs, lovers –  will fall from our necks when we’re stripped of life. None of us can breathe money. All of the possessions that we collect or gain will pass through our fingers like sand, when we’re poured out onto death’s silent beach.  

The only thing we really belong to is this place. The only true purpose we have is to protect it. The girl in the airline outift looks as me, weeping. Perhaps she realised at the same time that, like the butterflies, we are all delicate winged things.

A big black cross suddenly bleeds onto the screen. This man is dead, killed by cartels clearing land for avocados.

There’s only us left now.

As we file out of the room, heads bowed and eyes raw, a fit-looking man suggests lunch to his wife. Sushi? How about a sandwich?

Nothing with avocado, she shoots back like a gun.   

Love,

TN