Sometimes you gotta leave in a hurry, man, what can I say?
Except I didn’t forget about any of it
I’m taking it all back
Cupboards full of ingredients I have no idea what to do with. Tamarind sauce (I don’t even know what a tamarind is). White fungus (I know what that is, but nothing more). Rock sugar (just like regular sugar, but less convenient).
There’s a lesson in there somewhere. I’m not sure I’ll ever really learn it. Maybe one day. It’s certainly an evocative idea though. The snack that bites back; being consumed by consumables. Eventually reaching the point of throwing them away – deliberately getting rid of something which should be nourishing, because its physically nourishing qualities are undermined by its psychologically poisonous effects. Some of them stayed in the cupboard right up until the last minute, until the cupboard wasn’t going to be mine any more. I mean, was I really going to knowingly and deliberately bring with me ingredients that I didn’t know how to use?
Of course, you always leave a part of yourself behind, and you always keep something you took. You didn’t even know you were taking it at the time. It was just a natural part of what was being constructed. It was in your cupboard, but it wasn’t yours (singular); it was yours (plural), the yours that’s “ours”, possession blurred and possessions shared. Who can blame you for getting lost and confused with only 10% of the law left? It’s not a lot to cling to, for the judge or the jury, and the prosecution makes such a compelling case, and the witness is unreliable, and your stomach is unsure, and…
Anyway, I take issue with the notion of captives. Insofar as your soldiers remained in my land, they were defectors, free to leave and staying all the same. Maybe I defected too. Maybe by staying with me they were never leaving; a shift of the status quo, an alteration sustained.
I’m sitting in a new flat now, with new cupboards. The food in them is mine to eat.