Nostalgia: A Largely Culinary List

Tamales
Limp, steamed corn husks; a soft second home

Beans
The gelatinous bottom of bean cans, recycling, kitchen control

Tillamook Medium Cheddar
A surprise in the cheese basket of a Delhi grocery store, a space-time catapult

A Waifish Bicycle
From the market home, via the bookstore, to toast and paper and balloon; blue sunglasses

Strawberry Lemonade
A summer appropriate for stickiness, a thirst for freshness

A Big Glass Pickle Jar
A scoby, rice flour, a miscellaneous metal lid drawer, the craft beer takeaway across the street

Tacos
A wrist-to-elbow hot sauce drip on a cold night

Jim Beam
Avenue C, alone, a precious pack of Goldflakes distributed outside, dance-envy

Cilantro
The garden, the grocery store, the battle over coriander comparisons

Avocado
Earth butter, aesthetic wonder, the fruit that birthed a person

Hypothesis

Perhaps that feeling we are practised at identifying as yearning is in fact a
deep private pleasure—painful to contain, but insensible except in solitude.


The sharp tooth of desire; the dull edge of fulfillment.

"these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand"

How could we understand? Us women, with our natural fidelity and nesting instincts; our softness, our cleanness, our patience and leftbehindness. What could we know about rambling feet and wandering eyes? About dark urges and dive bars? About prolific desire, about grit, sex and recklessness? About what it is to kick around the possibility of love as though it were a bottle of 100 proof moonshine—an enticing risk, guaranteed to intoxicate, likely to destroy.

"...part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)" (Here.)

Yearning

There are things that make you want to want. This is foremost among them.



Brought to you by this amazing girl I know who did this amazing thing for me.

Black and white world.

Vision: Standing on a disembodied staircase in a very high place, with the anxious swoop of vertigo taking me over and the sudden sound of copter wings interrupting my fall.

Vicarious: Standing smally in front of a guy with a large fake crocodile on his head (or is it an alligator?), damp in my little coat, hat, and wellingtons, fallen rain swimming on stone all around. Rickety bicycles sliding by and disappearing around buildings slowly softening into themselves.

Vaastav: Standing on a cold, indifferent sidewalk, wishing something in this city would sneak its hand into mine.