My mission this week is to eat as many different kinds of curry as possible, and to not think about her.  So far, it’s working out very nicely, and she has not once crossed my mind.  I’ve been in Singapore for only a few hours, but have found an Indian restaurant that has already made me feel a little swoony.  It’s one of the benefits of having taste buds that are extremely sensitive, because smell is something that affects how we look at the world.

Nostalgia begins with the nose, literally, and that’s where I like to go whenever I’m here, because Singapore has memories that have nothing to do with her at all.  And we never got the chance to eat at an Indian restaurant, which is no loss, and even better because now I’m here and I can do this and not even think of her.  Onions remind me of being here before, long before I met her, when I discovered that Indian food is not mostly about heat or spice, but about subtleties.  Someone mentioned to me once that the Indian food in town is sometimes considered to be even better than what you can find in India.

I believe that.  I also believe that it’s possible to drown your senses in new sensations, and that can affect how memory behaves, and how it creates past events.  Maybe we are all made up of pieces of what happened before, but it’s true that in the moment we can rewrite how we think about the past.  She used to like to do that with me, where we’d be talking about childhoods with a conscious effort to retell it in a way that we liked.  It was one of the best ways to spend an afternoon and I just broke my promise to myself, and suddenly she’s everywhere.  It will be all right.

Remembering Singapore is a post from: Philippine Butterfly

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