Ageusia

Flavorless Town

I wish everything didn’t seem pointless just because I can’t taste anything. It could be pointless because it’s pointless. But the sudden absence of smell and taste, has truly bleached me of so many other feelings.

I’m like a child excised from her daemon in His Dark Materials, if you get that reference. I look like a stuffed doll. Numb and bored. Too analytical, too honest, creepy, depressed. (It will pass. I’m just telling you I am ailing.)

Taste is magic. I need wonder again. I need to wonder. That’s the irony. Loss of taste has me unable to wonder. The inability to taste, has made it so I can no longer wonder what I cannot describe. I would rather taste everything and lack the ability to describe it than taste nothing and be omniscient. Knowledge is anti-matter in my mouth.

My mouth today is a total vacuum. There is just: nothing. A black hole in the universe where there was once a star. So I also cease to exist, though I contain too much information. Please. Please take the information away from me. Rewind all the hours of footage, the infinite scrolls, the lifetime of compensating for stupidity triggers.

In this vacuum I feel no peace. There’s no zen or understanding of nirvana. I don’t like being detached from the need to please myself.

I’m more convinced than ever that I am someone meant to be flooded with wanting. Flooded. Flooded. Flooded with excitement. I want to be suffocated with sensory experience. I’m dying here without the dependable fetish of my imagination. I will probably smoke a cigarette. Take all the information back. Let me be pure feeling.

On the tip of my tongue, a cloud. Wrote a Taiwanese poet once wrote and I can’t for the life of me remember her name or the book it as in. Just the person who read it to me. I prefer not knowing anything but the voice of the utterance.

I beg you, body, to bring me back all of the wonder. Because in this state of ageusia, I’m uncomfortable in my body. It feels like the wrong size again. When food brings me no pleasure, it is a manacle. I wonder if we’ll ever break each other’s bread.

I’ve heard digestion begins with the act of smell. I have to learn for now to begin with the act of imagining. I pray my imagination fills my mouth with you.