Memory and appetite
The Night I Thought About Mushrooms
A sleepless night becomes an unexpected excavation. One memory, arriving uninvited, refuses to be slept through.
There haven’t been many nights in my life when I couldn’t sleep. And for those of you who are worried that this is a tragedy of insomnia, don’t be. Usually, I fall asleep in seconds, an achievement I suspect is considered very impressive by people who count sheep for a living. Whenever something weighs on me, I simply close my eyes as if reality is an unwelcome guest, and everything that happened simply didn’t.
This is a skill I call “selective ignorance”, and it is remarkably effective.
Because of this skill, I was never one of those cool, brooding writers who craft sentences in the cold hush of night, surrounded by cigarette smoke, bad music, and raw feelings. Waking up at five in the morning to write always made more sense. Until tonight.
Tonight, I cannot sleep. God. I toss and I turn. Strange, isn’t it, that the body can remember everything except how to be comfortable? And then, out of nowhere, I think about mushrooms. Yes, mushrooms. I suspect this is because somewhere, in some social media feed, a mushroom lodged itself in my memory like an unwanted but not entirely unpleasant relative.
Whenever my husband and I go to the market, he always tosses mushrooms into the basket. It never crosses my mind. I have always kept them at a distance, like distant relatives I never invite to family dinners.
And until tonight, I never asked myself;
“Why?”
Then, as I lie there in the dark, doing what I always do, trying to digest every problem in life by sleeping through it, a memory strikes me.
Sharp.
It comes from a tiny, dusty corner of my brain.
It is my grandmother’s last meal in her hospital room.
“How? Why now?”
I leap from the bed, muttering
“Wait, wait,” as if yelling might make the memory go back into hiding. I run to my computer and begin to write in the darkness. The scene is clearer than a window freshly washed: an old hand, moving slowly, almost politely. I see the wrinkles, the red peppers resting in the corner of her plate. She ate mushrooms almost every day, white button mushrooms with red pepper and olive oil, slowly braised, slightly overcooked. It was her favorite dish before she became sick.
My mother brought it to her each time she visited the hospital. You know how hospital food works: it can either make people lose the will to live, or sometimes, rarely, (almost magically) bring them back to life. So my mother kept cooking mushrooms for her. Again. And again.
And here’s the twist, the cruel little twist of life: I had erased mushrooms from my own life, because I had associated them with death. And tonight, an insomniac memory offered them back to me, warm, glowing, smelling faintly of hospitals, grief, and something like regret.
So now, in the quiet of this night, I must ask you:
“Do you have a food you associate with death?
”
I can’t be the only one. What dish hides in the corners of your memory, the one you never touch?
A soup?
A fish?
Perhaps a simple glass of water?
As I write this, I realize I cannot remember the last time my mother cooked anything with mushrooms. Perhaps she, too, walks past them at the market, not seeing them anymore, quietly avoiding them like a minor misfortune.
In the end, do we all eat the memories we could not swallow?
I should call her in the morning.
If memories can store dishes, what painful recipes must be gathering dust on everyone’s shelves?
Death lingers there. Terrifying, unspoken, avoided, a truth we hide behind pantry doors. Food and death. A mourning table. Served cold. A dish no one chooses, but the chef adds it to the menu anyway because it always sells. Because someone has to feed us the feelings we refuse to name.
Is grief the only meal we all eat, even when we swear we’re not hungry?
If what I have written here feels harsh, I am sorry. I am only trying to share the part of life we never set on the table.
Truthfully,
Nesrin Eren
