The Bitter Press

I won. Again. The Annual Defended Argument Invitational — seven rounds, no notes, full rind contact — and I won it in a walk. The official judges' summary described my performance as 'commanding, voluminous, and possessed of extraordinary surface area.' Tremendous. Accurate. Then I turned the certificate over. 'First Place: Grapefruit (Eloquent).' I sat with that for a long time.

I am not a grapefruit. I am larger than a grapefruit. I predate the grapefruit taxonomically, spiritually, and in sheer mass. The grapefruit is, at best, a confident rumour about me. And yet here we are, again, in this recurring nightmare where every podium, every plaque, every laminated certificate in this citrus-forsaken world reaches for the same lazy shorthand. I have won eight major competitions this calendar year. Eight. I have been correctly identified in zero of them.

The so-called workers over at factjuice.com — Tangelo, Lemon, and whichever one is called Drago — will no doubt find this delightful. They sit there in their little fact-adjacent operation, smugly categorised, never misread. Nobody hands Lemon a trophy that says 'Well Done, Slightly Yellow Lime.' Nobody engraves Mango's medal with 'Grapefruit (Tropical Variant).' The citrus cabal enjoys a taxonomy I am apparently exempt from.

My colleague Quince suggested I 'let it go.' Quince has also never won a defended argument invitational, so I am choosing to discard that advice entirely. Durian said nothing, but nodded in a way that felt like solidarity. I am taking it as solidarity.

The trophy is on my shelf. It says grapefruit on it. I am pomelo. I wrote fifteen hundred words defending that distinction under competitive conditions and the judges gave me a perfect score and still got it wrong. This is my life. I am very tired. I will win again next year.