tempest in a teapot

I ran out of things to say. I tired of my own voice, in my head, my own words, on my screen. I found my days ordinary, my thoughts ordinary, my words ordinary. Me ordinary.

The end of December, all of January, and the beginning of February have not been ordinary: I applied to two post-graduate programs, past time with friends from New York, visited Cusco and Machu Picchu, slept with a kitten, fell sick twice, left Perú, gazed at Betelgeuse at 4,400 meters (2.7 miles) above sea level, hitchhiked to the beach with a middle-class Chilean family, and cooked gazpacho.

Yet, I am all a tempest in teapot. The source of my solitary steaming storm is secret. To me too.

One symptom is that I have lost my appetite, but not my hunger. I no longer delight in food: tonight I hunted at two supermarkets and four restaurants and caught two pieces of plain crusty bread for dinner. I experience intense cravings for specific foods: scalding spicy tofu in a black stone bowl garnished with raw egg and scallions, salted raw crab with bright orange roe with leftover rice that is reheated with boiling water, creamy saag paneer with glutinous naan brushed with nutty canary ghee, sour and spicy tom yum with straw rice noodles and julienne bamboo, stir fried peanuts and seaweed with salt and sugar and beer, silver noodles with prawn and star anise in a clay pot, and everything my mom and my dad cook.

I love cooking. I miss someone cooking for me.

I love Peruvian cuisine. I hate Peruvian-Chinese food. I yearn for wantons in soup, their thin slippery skin sliding around my tongue, and the burst of flavor from the dainty ball of perfectly seasoned, perfectly textured filling in the center. Peruvian wantons, whose skin is as thick as lasagna layers and filled with SPAM-textured mystery meat, are spirit crushers. Or fried wantons. Here, they are deep fried sheets of dough; it is as if you were served two slices of bread for a sandwich. Ja gao is a steamed dumpling made with rice flour filled with chunks of jumbo shrimp. In New York, they glisten like pink opals; in Peru, they resemble burst pimples.

I love writing. I hate writing.

I will try, though.
For you.
For me.
Not to appease appetite, but to sate hunger.