Saudade

And as he sits there in the hawker centre, nursing his bowl of salted vegetables and duck soup, the sourness and saltiness of the broth hitting the back of his throat as violently as a barbed insult, the mounted oscillating fans moving the sluggish tropical air around him, he is instantly taken back to adolescent autumns in North Carolina and the hearty beef stews concocted by his mother, almost able to taste the carrots, celery and potatoes along with the fatty meat and burnt umber-coloured liquid, the assemblage both a comfort and a revivification after late afternoon marching band practice and bicycle-riding with his high school friends and frantic games of pickup basketball with the other neighbourhood teens, the air filled with a crispness that soaked into his lungs and the skin of his bare arms and face, the very temperature exuding the excitation of change, of the transition from summer to winter, that in-between state in which he’d always felt most at home, and before he can stop himself, an overwhelming wave of longing and nostalgia washes over him, the temporal link between that point in spacetime and this shortened to an infinitesimal distance so that the memories of that time and that place in that particular period of his life become immediately present and overpowered by the notion that no matter how hard he might try, he will never ever be that same person again.

(Originally published in Twenty-Four Flavours: Salted Vegetables and Duck Soup, July 2014.)