By: The Peach from ‘Call Me By Your Name’

Some peaches shoot for the moon. They see their friends and relatives pass from orchard to grocery store to human digestive tract, and strive for more. But their tragedy lies in their truth: They can’t pick who picks them. They can only rely on sheer luck to end up getting eaten by Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth instead of being canned and sent to colleges with idiot freshmen who are too incompetent to make balanced meals whenever Food Court is closed. But thankfully, I’m a very lucky peach. I didn’t get swirled into a tube of Gogurt, or stuffed into an experimental fruit salad by a raw vegan with a neckbeard. I didn’t even get eaten by an inexplicably smiling white woman in a stock photo, or stuffed into a dessert like the hundreds of brave, honorable peaches who died to make the peach pie in Labor Day. No. I made it further than any other peach in the history of peaches: I got fucked by Timothee Chalamet.

But before you go calling me a slut and saying I slept my way to the top or monetized my body for fame, let me remind you that I did not ask to be cast in Call Me By Your Name. After all, I am a non-sentient mass of organic matter that cannot move or speak. Moreover, I must mention that while I have exulted in my new station in life, I am without a lover. Again, I am a peach — a fleshy, edible container for an unfertilized angiosperm — and do not actually sexually reproduce. I would not know what to do with a lover except offer my body to him as sustenance.

But this is still a love story — or, at least, what you humans might call a love story.

While I can’t reproduce, I can still form non-sexual attachments that bring me to spiritual orgasm — and I have experienced this sensation four times in my life. Notably, three of those times were before I ever met Timothee Chalamet, the man who inseminated me for a chance at an Oscar nomination.

I remember the first time as clear as day. I was a starry-eyed, newly ripe peach living in an orchard right outside of Milan, and I had big dreams. My mother, i.e., the flower that produced me, had told me to “shoot for the moon,” and I did. Well, at least, I thought about it, before realizing one day that I couldn’t move. But when Giuseppe, a sun-kissed farmer from Verona, picked me from my tree on a brisk Sunday morning, I knew he was the man who’d help me fly. Suddenly, I was tumbling around in his swinging basket — my world a nauseating blur — and his deep, azure eyes had pierced into my own. I fully came. But, alas, I never saw him again. He threw me into a crate with several hundred other peaches and handed us to a distributor who drove us to a grocery store in Pandino. I spent an entire hour shoved up against my best friend’s ass.

It was at the grocery store in Pandino that I met my next true love. His name was Paolo, and he moved me from my original crate to a new crate in the Produce section. For those two seconds in which his right hand swung me through the air towards my new home, I fully came.

Then, one day later, after many cruel fuckboys had locked their gorgeous, soulful eyes on me before deciding to just get apples instead, I met my third true love. His name, for all intents and purposes, was “Yo,” since everyone shouted “Yo” at him before waving him over. I found out later that this was because he was Luca Guadagnino’s personal assistant. But he was young, short, and round, and he sported what could only be referred to as “peach fuzz,” which was incredibly hot. So as soon as his chapped, grubby fingers closed around my stem, I partly came. “Wait, why didn’t I fully come, like the last two times?” I thought to myself. But then I fully came, and moved on to think about other things. But sadly, just like Giuseppe and Paolo, Yo left me. After picking me out and shoving me into a bag with several other peaches, Yo threw our bag into the back seat of his Fiat and forced us to spend the next three hours staring at each other and wondering if there is a God.

When we finally got to set, I overheard Luca mention to Yo that he and Timothee (whom I could not see from my vantage point) would need to “practice” with a few of us peaches. And while I did not know what this meant at the time, I assumed it meant that he and Timothee would also be bringing us to spiritual orgasm. So you can probably imagine my shock and disillusionment when I spent the next hour watching Luca — and then Timothee — jizz inside my friends and then dispose of them, one by one, into a trash bin.

But there was something different about the way Timothee jizzed inside of me — and not just because it was for the shot that would end up in the movie and make me famous. Nay, there was a certain tenderness and care with which he jizzed inside of me that made me feel beautiful — greater. Suddenly, I soared above myself and into eternity, and knew I was grander than any peach that ever was. In fact, I was no longer a peach. For those three seconds, I was a god. I didn’t even need to fully come to feel this way. (But I did. I fully came.)

But then Timothee wiped away my fuzz sweat, stared at me for a beat, and discarded me like the others. And just like that, my career was over. I wondered if my friends had felt the same way when he discarded them, but I decided against asking. After all, I needed to distance myself from them before I became famous later. And in any case, it didn’t matter. I had known what it was to be a god, and I would never forget.

And even now, when all I have left (besides fame and fortune) is a lifetime of memories and a penis-shaped hole inside me, I still believe I’m one of the lucky ones. After all, not every peach gets to shoot for the moon.

(Ed: The ‘Call Me By Your Name’ peach died of natural causes after telepathically dictating this essay to Flagrant writers from a canopy bed in his Beverly Hills mansion. His agent will continue campaigning for a posthumous Oscar nomination on his behalf.)

Please follow and like us: