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Life Sucks

Written for Word Tonic’s third anthology - “New Beginnings”.

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From the very start, we already suck. Snatched from the womb and slotted into one life, our small lips pucker, and we’re ready to suck instantly. First, the milk from our mother’s sore nipples, then the imposter, a round, pierced nib of tasteless plastic. We move away from this abode and discover the flesh of our own thumbs; we learn independence, and we comfort ourselves. Life sucks, and so does our beginnings.

When we’re a few years older, we start sucking elsewhere, but it’s expected to be called ‘sipping’ since we’ve got manners now. From a stickered sippy cup to a thick milkshake, worming itself up a McDonald’s straw- it becomes unrecognisable and functionless after chewing the hole closed when you get bored. Then, a lollipop where sucking evolves into aggressive biting or re-wetting our chewed toothbrush and out seeps that dried strawberry toothpaste. The initial family dinners involve the colourful plastic cups, when you want the blue one on a Tuesday, and fight over the pink one when a friend comes over. The pink cup is inferior, no matter what squash concoction stains its walls.

It does not compare to the glass cup. That special one, out of that Wilkinson’s six-pack. The household must start with six and end with six (the mother shields them). It’s the ‘Holy Communion’ moment when one is entrusted with an unspilled drink for the whole duration of dinner. Fresh from the dishwasher and your mother’s hands, you’ve upgraded to an advanced and evolved ‘sipping’ mechanism; the contents of the glass are now visible, and so is your level of drinking progress (hydration makes your parents proud). The satisfaction from sucking to slurping to sipping – you have grown up. You are so adult. With regular unspilled glasses, you are permitted access to mugs, a glimpse at big boobs on shot glasses, gold chalices at Church, and even coke in wine glasses at Chinese Buffets. You’re an adult now; you get to suck on anything.

Then we’re a few years older; you get to suck on less inanimate objects and more alive things. First, it’s yourself, the back of your hand because you went to an all-girls school, then that first kiss (that, retrospectively, actually sucked). Occasionally, other humans don’t work; the pacifier becomes a cigarette, a vape, the fresh air on a morning you decide to meditate, your dad's ‘cool’ but disappointingly tasting beer, an inhaler.

From tangible, the sucking becomes intangible and purely shit. Missing the bus, the regrets of buying an expensive item, getting rejected, being late for a birthday dinner, the itch to say something and we just can’t, acne, feminist quotes that resonate, but insecurities are stubbornly sticky, overdraft, wanting to do everything. But this lifetime feels so short, wasted time, too many chips, fuck, we’ve grown apart; I don’t find that funny anymore. I miss dried strawberry toothpaste and that pink cup. It all starts sucking, and things just keep happening to us, and things are always happening to me, and life really does suck sometimes and…

Unconscious, habitual, and innate, we find that baby obsessed with its thumb, still inside of us. Like the comfort and nourishment we once felt as babies, we are too comfortable saying it ‘sucks.’ When we (or life) ‘sucks’ too hard, it leaks everywhere; it’s slathered all over our lips, in every crevice of our mouths, as plaque stuck between our teeth. We never stop sucking. We are consumed. It’s all we taste: Dissatisfaction. Excitement for life and tomorrow is syphoned from us.

Today and every day, we are reborn with a new beginning, just in a grown-up, post-pubescent, awkward body and, unfortunately, no bib. When we suck in, slurp, sip, there’s also that neglected and forgotten part: The ‘out.’ We’ll inevitably continue to suck. We’ll make a mess. But it shouldn’t suck the life out of us.

© Shania J. Saldi