a food Q&A : fallacies and figments

Mai, do you remember the first time you had food poisoning?

I don’t, but I imagine it being fault of a fig, or a fib. The fruit was a lie and so was I. Desire-design is never a benign thing, it’s not something you uncover. I was naked, or so I wanted him to believe, sitting slinky in a bright black dress. Small in my head, big in his eyes, watching me dine on fruit-flesh, a purple-red bruise over a bed of bad seeds. I sucked the skin. You know you’re not supposed to eat the skin, he said. Everywhere around us silverware clinking and non-smoking signs for the brave hearts. I didn’t tell him then that a fig is part figment and part flower, and that the flower envelopes a sunless space to bare seeds.

A closed world of matrimony/ No scent to the outside world.

I imagine he didn’t know Andre Gide.

At this point, I stopped thinking of edible flowers. The fig now gutted inside my dimming space was a bruise that brewed. Seeds or maggots or poisoned birch pollen swelled, and I needed a bed where I could flare in all the hues fuck freely. A grainy room, a glaring light, and big strokes of black and blonde heads, and his eyes, his eyes, big on me when I needed a vine most.

I love skin, I said, another fib finally, dreadfully.

∞

OK, now Nur, you tell me: a rooftop, two lovers and two edibles. What happens next?

Next, we lay on a ground, stare at a sky. Electronic music disorients me & I’m too stoned to protest his playlist. The

shadows of plants dance on the walls. I turn to look at him: his elongated nose, the bump on his forehead. As though sensing my gaze, his eyes open. Instead of me, he reaches for the pot brownie.

‘Chocolate with a touch of rosemary,’ he says after a bite. Earlier this morning, I told him he has a problematic relationship with language, that he uses his strong command of it to deceive. What I actually wanted to say was: Be weak around me, will you, please.

He chews slowly & then continues, still not looking at me, ‘Don’t you find it difficult to describe the taste of things?’ He turns the edible over in his hand. ‘I mean, I can describe touch–what it feels like to hold this. Delicate, can easily crumble.’ He moves into a seated position. The sole of his left shoe faces me like a full stop. ‘Vision is even easier,’ he continues. ‘The shape of those two women in the building ahead, look, the blackness that surrounds this city. But something about the sense of taste requires a dependence on adjectives that always seem to need more adjectives. Rosemary tastes lemony. Lemon tastes zesty. You see? The process of describing taste is sticky and unfulfilling.’

He has one final bite, I wonder how high he needs to be. I am already rolling like a marble & what is he on about? Lemon is sharp, acidic. Rosemary has a woody aftertaste. He lays back down beside me, I keep my eyes open. Minutes pass, hours, I’m not sure. ‘Was that whole speech a metaphor for our relationship?’ I ask stupidly. I’ve been trying to ask that question for a while but it only crawls out my mouth now. He tells me to stop making everything about myself. Says it in good humour but I know he means it.

A breeze, marbles spinning on concrete, & then an image invades me like a migraine. My mother’s gorgeous set of white plates from that shop in Clemenceau. The plates breaking, in minutes, hours, I’m not sure. How my mother had thought it a good omen. How she replaced them all with a cheeky smile from the cheap shop downstairs. I look at him, crumbs on his belly, tiny & trailing. I sit up.

∞

Mai, here’s another one for you: What was the best meal you’ve ever had?

It was snow.

I was in Johnson, Vermont when I earlied myself out of bed sheets at 6am. Outside my window, anniversaries were everywhere, merry and falling and flaking like cloud crumble. By my porch, a bench sat glazed in icing under a holly tree and icicle berries. I wondered about the icicles, how rain can freeze mid-drip, as if stunned by the berries.

Back in spring, those benches were where girls like confection sat in mismatched bikinis crazed with cravings. Back in spring, the boy-gents sat on the sidewalks sipping beer and reading gloomy Irish poets they wanted to be. In the afternoon, all the girls and boys stripped down to burst like water bombs into the Gihon River. Everywhere above them a sky bed of maple leaves and sun syrup. It was exactly like the postcard picture, the one I had picked from Ebenezer Books. Holding it now in my gloved hand, I wondered, why do springs die so young?

I left spring in the postcard on my bedside table, and hurried myself into the winter where all was still, and yet still ceremonious. On my walk, I saw slushed sidewalks lounged like rabbit fur, and I knew. Nur, I knew there was nothing solitary about snow, that time when still is distilled space.

I had been in Vermont for a week and still hadn’t found the Gihon River. So I walked over the bridge, crunching crystals under my feet, determined to find it when it found me first. Under the bridge, an indigo puddle amongst ice sheets. Can you believe it, all this time, I had been crossing over, assuming the ground under was road when it was river? Or was it in sub-zero weather, with no water under the bridge, nothing to disturb that peace?

That universe, that snow globe crumbling clouds, covering me whole. I opened my mouth, welcomed the weather, the wind gusts and how they shaped the journey of each snowflake differently. There, landing on my tongue, in my vast valley, was a feast.

∞

Talking about food and places, Nur, describe to me a taste that takes you to a place you left long ago.

Your winter was my summer, some years ago too. I chased love like a racoon. Explosive the way mulberries are, making a song of everything I touched. That June, a man handed me cheese to taste. It was after we’d lost our way to Kefraya, again & again, but the drive through Ammiq could have stunned you into surrender. Green was the color of my god. Green was the color of another man’s eyes, the one with color-coded bookshelves in Sodeco who gave me Bluets & told me I’d find something in it & it’s true, I did. All the months were tender, the way a tongue can be. July & a woman with big hair crossed Rue Gouraud, prosecco a clutch in her hands. Another woman touched my fingers on the red couch before we fell asleep. The red couch, the many nights it supervised. Nothing could come close to Beirut on Sundays, how the chairs unfolded under the sun the way origami does. How its streets seemed to be saying, here, here, take one more. On Gemmayze’s stairs a man with unfinished braids read me a poem from his phone, told me he’s tired of running. It was in the heat of August, I asked him to stay though I can’t tell if he did. The months were impermanent, the way a gaze can be. I flung my body like fairy lights zigzagging a tree. I swallowed the summer like a seed. That was how I repaid my debts, how I pled guilty. On Gemmayze’s stairs a man said this wasn’t working out, & I searched for him the next evening, through the corners & into the bar.