Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I have been thinking about taste memories.

On Thursday night I was having a bbq in a suburb with the family of one of my good friends. The yard was filled with laughing kids and parents and siblings and friends, a haze of hamburger-scented smoke drifted over all of us, and it was still warm enough to not need a sweater over my dress. I stopped moving for a moment and watched, happy, and just then someone handed me a slice of homemade antelope sausage. The rich taste of antelope will be forever connected to that friendly bbq.

Saturday morning I woke up after only a few hours of sleep, mouth lined with cigarettes and whiskey and being awake too late talking, all of which tasted exactly like falling in love during the summer of 2001.

This morning, thanks to an unfortunate number of rituals falling through, I drank the instant coffee I have stashed in my desk. It tasted like China, like waking up in the hotel in Suzhou after days and days of being wiped out by heat and smog and fighting and walking and bad food and feeling homesick and convinced that the whole trip was a terrible idea.

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