Sweets for my Sweet

SWEETS FOR MY SWEET

My darling sweet, my darling sweet, we have known each other for many years, have we not, but when we first met, in that tiny playground of the school, we were so young and now almost forgotten as the people we once were. The photos that were taken are what we have to go on, thank goodness, filling in the gaps; even snapshots in black and white can carry the souls of the beings we once were, two tiny kids hand in hand.

To celebrate our long time together, my darling sweet, I am about to supply those sweets we once enjoyed so very much, sweets that you can't buy these days, and although tiny sweet shops with weighing machines and jars and triangular paper bags still exist, they are rare, and even if they do exist their sweets are different. Sweets that do not have the smell of the 1950s about them. The feel of those old times surely no longer exists as sweets, you think. Stickiness that got stuck somewhere in the past, leaving us with flat and unsharp and smooth and unsticky ones today. But I have found the original sweets still edible but with the smell and stickiness of the 1950s still clinging to them. Can you believe it? You know how you have been able to trust me over so many years of happy togetherness. But first you need to find these sweets. This is a game like the ones we used to play. A laughter of tricks and clues.

Ah, you have found them too easily, my darling sweet. You are so clever, always have been. No change there. But I meant you to search all day, but you are as ever too clever for me. Your smile is as sweet as it ever was, my now seeing you gaze in disbelief at the sweets you've found for yourself, without my help, sweets not as sweet as your smile, I hasten to add. A teardrop at the corner shop of your eye, a sign of joy, not sadness, of course. I try to return your smile with my own, but it cannot compare with yours, I'm sure. Ah, you do not need to open your compact for its mirror. I believe you, as you believe me. And now the game of laughter has tripped your smile into further ricochets of hiccuping. Always the same hiccuping hilarity, and I know you are as happy as Chloe.

Yes, do open the triangular paper bags, to see the sweets more clearly. To feel their stickiness on the tips of your fingers. Sorry, they are not in proper 1950s paper, stiff, and crimped. Pinked. And drizzled with sugar grains. But being cellophane, you can see the sweets without first getting yourself too sticky. Fruit drops, penny chews, humbugs, bull's eyes, pineapple chunks, pear drops, lemon sherbets, and rhubarb-and-custard pieces just for you tasting like school dinner puddings, and yes, I know, not all those were quite the same or even available at all in the old days, but a pick-a-mix today is as good as a choice of beautiful pastel or even primary colours in jars all those years ago.

We used to get our faces covered in stickiness, I remember, thus allowing our kisses to seem to last almost forever.

I watch you touch the sweets gingerly. Testing out the bags for further openings that have inadvertently been ripped into them during your first excited rush at getting at them, after long calm moments of pent up anticipation. Try first the rhubarb and custard ones, my darling sweet. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at their surge of gentle flavour. Even longer moments of nostalgic hindsight as you allow them to seep into you with their essential sweetness of distant past time's premonition of our loving life together...

Go on, suck hard, do not chew. You have to watch your teeth. Ah, I am so pleased. Sweets for my sweet. And your sweet smile itself can now hopefully last forever for me, even beyond the peaceful end of your laughter. Close your compact, my darling sweet. Keep your powder dry.