tea.

2022

I arranged the tea you brought me in my cabinet, but I was dreaming of a simple wooden box they deserved to fit neatly into. This box would be lovely to the touch, and would resemble the forest that it was sacrificed from just to hold this gift from you. Textured, in unpredictable patterns of brown and black as your eye follows the line down its smooth surface. Perhaps I have seen a box like it in my life. From its hinged door, it must have smelled of its contents—tulsi, rose blossoms, mint leaves, chamomile flowers, and bergamot— and the aroma might have been so rich that the obviousness of its utility held hands tightly with the patency of its beauty, and prize. 

I don’t have a wooden box like the one in my dreams, so I stacked the plastic-wrapped sachet bundle sacredly on one of the three shelves in this kitchen that are for my things. Each time I pulled a little square from the colorful packet that you stuffed full of care, smiled bigger than the last. I handled them with wonder and gratitude, and thanked each of them for the gift they are to me—a microcosm of the gift you are to me.

I remembered, just then this morning, to reach my fingertips to the stove knob next to my right hip, and to boil the water that is always left in the kettle since the last time my housemate or I made a whole pot. From below my scratchy throat, bypassing my lips that missed you while you were gone, bypassing my nose swollen from trumpeting out mucus, the quiet song of “thank you” began swimming up my body from my stomach and pouring out of my eyes.

Your generosity made the tears come back again and again. The kind of tears that are reserved for the quietest, most alone true moments. I know you know the ones. By the way, you are so new to me you couldn’t know, but I almost never get sick. I know now that when I do it is to teach me about the abundance of love. And today, how I will love you for everything that you are, including how you snuck into my heart, and onto the shelf of this cabinet, where few sacred and nourishing things actually fit.

The rest of the shelves in this kitchen hold an unintentional smattering of dishes, snacks, unused baby supplies from years after the kid in this house would have used them last, and more pots for cooking than forks for eating. So much about this house makes sense only in this way. Lopsided. Like, if you dropped a shiny ball bearing in the middle of any of the floors here, I imagine it would roll a different speed and direction any given day. These three shelves hold the contents of the foods that I eat sparingly, as I look, and wonder when they might be closer to full again. I told my therapist that a big part of the reason I stopped eating was not wanting the food I have now to be gone. It’s not nostalgia, nor any other reason we choose to hang on to things. It comes from resource scarcity. Sometimes I say things to myself like, ashe, what if you are hungry and only have these lentils someday? Better not exhaust this little baggie of them, in case that’s all there is. Clearly all these words are spoken and heard inside my head, and breifly, in stock-taking stares upwards, with my hand still holding the cabinet door, poised to shut it again without having taken anything out. 

I am so glad to get to see your gift there beaming back at me, sweetly demanding this narrative in me change somehow, and soon. I feel the possibility, and the relativity of time, but hope weighs a lot. And sometimes hope feels too heavy, and I set it down when I am tired. Or hungry.   

The cost of food in this place where you are from, is somehow always more than my home, despite the proximity of where I am standing to where so much of it broke through the earth. So when I’m here, I eat like I don’t want to, boiling a handful of the pasta from the blue box and sealing the rest for later. After draining the water off the pot and doing the same with a can of beans, I mix them with the handful of softened noodles, and shred a tiny bit of Parmesan cheese off the hunk that lives in the bottom of the fridge. I assure myself that I am not hungry for more than this today anyhow. I am struck suddenly with embarassment that makes my head shake quickly back and forth. I remembered a lover (who doesn’t want me, but doesn’t want to let me go) when she told me once to never buy pre-shredded Parmesan, and that she read this in a cookbook for rich people. I feel the searing pain of judgment in that comment every time I see the green-topped, plastic jug that takes up residence in the fridge in nearly every home I have lived, despite my vow to never again buy it myself.

This eating like a bird from my cabinets was a strategy I developed as a kid when there wasn’t enough. When you are nine years old and poor, and white, with a paternal lineage whose wealth was only confusing juxtaposed to your own living conditions, you somehow know that panhandling is more lucrative when you’re clean, seem happy, and are respectful of other people’s time. The cruel irony of how little of any of that felt possible for the people who lived like us was not lost on me, even then. 

Excuse me, sir? Any chance you have an extra quarter or two? My mother (not, my momma) sent me for groceries but I am short fifty-two cents. Can you imagine? 

I always made up the amount I was short on, along with the idea that my mother had sent me to any such place. My Momma, who was most certianly not home while I was awake in the last few days, did not have fifty-two cents to send me someplace with. But she did have sense enough to teach me wordlessly about the cost of things like noodles and beans when we were at the store together. And how to fish out the silver foil packet of flavor before plunging the brick of beige, wavy-haired supper into the pot when it started to boil. And to wait. And how to open the can of protein with church key triangles all the way around because, at the time, we didn’t have a can opener. I remember thinking, opening cans is better this way, because my little hands hated muscling my way all the way around a stubborn can anyway. Not to mention the chore of getting the opener to seal correctly before starting to grind away at its circumference. The church key method was fun. And cleaning up what liquid that spilled out in my less-than-careful hacking wasn’t the worst chore on my list. 

I got a job in a restaurant last week much farther from my house than makes sense, because I could tell when you took me there that the people running the place keep it open to feed people. Not for any other reason. And when your righteous knowing reminds you that you are from land where the footfalls of Black Panthers grew the consciousness of ordinary people to their own worth and dignity, you feed people. In all kinds of clever and creative ways. I wanted to sell my labor here, and not closer to my front door, because I know how to thrive under conditions of gratitude.

Thank you so much. I hope you have a good day.

I would sweetly say to the smartly dressed men and women whom I targeted for my alms. They almost always had some change to spare. When they didn’t, I was sweet also. I don’t remember any of them seeming to think much more of it as they disappeared into the grocery store behind us. I took pains to not shop alongside them, waiting a reasonable amount of time before heading to the aisles where I would select my three packs of ramen noodles, as I called them then (7 cents each), and two cans of pinto beans (13 cents each) to prepare while my brother and sister weren’t looking that night. I would sometimes also budget for one can of corn (5 cents), but would hide that for myself because eating the little kernels straight from the metal cylinder tasted to me like candy. And I knew I wanted the doughnuts (50 cents each), but they were never quite in the budget. The doughnuts were in the same aisle they sold the magazines, where the grocery store workers had set up a little table and chairs next to a pot of complimentary coffee. The grocery store coffee tasted just like the recovery room coffee where we used to find ourselves waiting at night, for individual hours at a time, while my mother told and listened to heroic tales of powerlessness, experience, strength, and hope. 

In this moment, I find my consciousness snapped awake from this daydream of my past, and drawn to the ceramic mug on my bedside table. The teabag that I selected from the clutch you handed me before I said we can’t date each other anymore has been steeping for the length of time it took me to tell you about myself. And how the water has gone cold as I typed all this to you. Earlier, in the kitchen, I picked the one that looked like you had won it in an auction during a gathering of elder Berkeley lesbians who oppose nuclear war. It had handwriting like a poem on the bag. There was a little DIY sachet that you are supposed to close with a tiny drawstring. The challenge of threading the impossibly thin line into itself to close the unbleached, semi-permeable baggie reminded me of learning to sew. I stuffed the singular pouch they provided, tucked in with the plastic wrapped loose flower buds, while the song of tears still streamed down my face from before. I put the rest of the little flowers back up on the middle of my three shelves, and walked to my room, mug steaming in my hand, and sat down on my bed, knowing I wanted to tell you this story. 

The contents of that tea bag made the hot water pink instantly, and now, in their neglected tepidness, they almost glow a deep purple. I want you to know that every gesture of kindness you offer me inspires a story that I want to share back. And every story you sail to me on your voice, of Persian freedom fighters, and bathing baby boys, creates a bond I will never let go, because you know how to share stories of love.

And because in this way, I love you too.
And because of how we share, no matter what, I always will.