honeywarm

i. honeywarm. 

 

Have you ever had papaya?

 

Trick question. It really doesn’t matter whether you’ve had papaya or not; you’ve probably never had papaya with honey and a squeeze of lime juice, mixed together until it’s all sticky in a pool of sweet and sour and like molten bronze. It tastes like childhood, sun-dappled golden beneath that withered tree in your backyard that could only give you shade for so long. Until you got big. And then the sun finds you and pulls you in a searing embrace, nips your ear and whispers to you the secrets of summer, and then autumn, and then winter, and you burn.

 

What tastes like childhood for you? Here are my guesses: ice cream. Avocado. Chocolate milkshake. And just to break the Rule of Three for the sake of shaking a sharp stick at literature, I don’t know, popsicles.

 

Except that’s not right at all, isn’t it?

 

Because it doesn’t matter whether you’ve tried papaya or not. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve tried ice cream; have you tried having them in sandwich blocks that a street vendor cuts in half for you and wraps in paper, where the vanilla always looks a bit more yellowish than usual but oh dear lord you’ve never tried anything better since? It doesn’t matter whether you’ve tried chocolate milkshake; have you ever ordered it off the menu of an obscure diner tucked in the middle of Denpasar, filled with the kind of red that stings your eyes and burrows deep in your gut and 50s-60s paraphernalia that reach out and try to touch you, stare at you across the toilet? It doesn’t matter you’re a child; have you grown up yet?

 

Oh, my bad. Rule of Three.

 

And what does childhood taste like for you? That’s a different question entirely. Is it a dingy arcade in the corner of your block, awash with the blue of nautical fame and sounding of PacMan and beeping and anguished children crying for their tokens, lost forever to a rigged claw machine? Or, it can be simple, like airports at 5 am, you’re small enough to fit sitting atop your luggage and someone faceless is pushing the cart forward, and the place smells like phantoms and coffee and that inexplicable otherworldly word: ‘travel’.

 

I offer this: think about it. We can move on from throwing rocks at windows, but I remind you to remember.

 

In the meantime, try strawberry lemonade. It’s gross.