When I taste salt I remember kissing your neck when you’d come home from the gym, pumped up, testosterone-fueled and wanting me, the tang of dried sweat on your skin, the beat of your heart drumming against my lips. I remember how the world melted away and it was just you and me and us. When I taste salt I remember loving you more than I loved myself.
That first bitter bite of coffee sends me to the round kitchen table in the apartment we shared where apartment, kitchen, and table were too small for a pair but somehow just right for us. The plans we made on Sunday mornings when the sun streamed in through the window over the sink, bright and filled with possibility. I drink tea now, less assertive on my tongue and reminding me of nothing.
Chocolate covered strawberries taste like love, marriage, and happily ever after, sweet and smooth on my tongue. You knew they were my favorite and made up reasons to bring them home to me: Valentine’s Day, my birthday, the second Tuesday of March. I bought one the other day and it turned to chalk in my mouth, the richness gone without you.
When I taste macaroni and cheese, I remember standing in your kitchen stirring the roux while you lectured me on the proper ratio of cheese to pasta. When I taste a good one I think of you, soft and strong, gentle and gruff. They brought trays of it that afternoon, gummy and cold and nothing like you. I threw it all away and set about making my own which I left uneaten because without you there was no point.
The tang of wine on my tongue used to relax me, but now it tastes like tears and grief and the most profound sadness, an endless freefall into nothingness, where I can’t remember you or me or us.
When I taste his lips I struggle to remember what yours tasted like, the softness of them, the pressure. It’s fading, though you are always with me in the salty, and the sweet, and the bitter.
