In second grade, I had a forbidden love. My draconian parents decreed my ardour to be ‘detrimental,’ and denied me any contact with my dearest. Yet, my callow mind was spellbound, enchanted by emotions I had never before confronted. I would spend hours dreaming of the sweet taste of her upon my lips. by You see, my love affair was with the starburst party mix, and most candy for that matter. My persecuted passions burned brighter and brighter throughout my youth, stoked by the starvation of her soothing, sugared embrace. When I finally reached the climax of puberty, I possessed the freedom and financial facilities to regularly consummate our love in the confectionery aisle of the local Coles. However, as time passed, the sweetness of the jelly snakes began to sour, and the glamour of the gummies began to lessen – it has reached a point today where I prefer an abstinent affair with an apple to any kind of candy. In retrospect, it wasn’t even the gustatory rush that I was inherently allured by. What I truly relished was that sense of transgression, of autonomy, of exercising my free will in the face of oppression.
Forbidden Fruit Kayvan Gharbi
This desire to pursue the prohibited is something that transcends the obscene sugar obsession of my childhood. It is something rather universally human - underlying our histories, literature and religions. Our chronicles are scarred by the implications of forbidden love, from Antony and Cleopatra plunging Ancient Rome into civil war, to Gossip Girl’s Jenny and Nate setting the Upper East Side ablaze with scandal. It is fascinating that we consider the tale of Romeo and Juliet to be the paragon of romance, in which the brightest of passions burn in the face of oppression. There is something about the forbidden, the taboo, that stokes our passions and excites our psyche in a manner that can transform the everyday into the electrifying. The reasoning behind such behaviour eluded me – it seemed nonsensical to have evolved such an ostensibly destructive trait. If evolution optimises the dissemination of one’s genes, is it not more efficient to pursue relationships of ‘less resistance,’ minimising the amount of work required to achieve the same outcome (children)? It seemed a glitch in our operating system, a stray blot of ink as Aphrodite scrawled upon the manuscript of our libido. However, such is indeed no fault of a goddess, but a side effect of the byzantine and intertwined motivations that define our human condition.
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