Why does a pinch of salt make sweetness taste sweeter? Why does a shot of espresso make chocolate taste more like chocolate, and not less? Why does the tongue need a little grief to find the good?
I was thirty-something before I asked that out loud, hands reeking of garlic, which feels like it should embarrass me more than it does? A woman my age, undone by a bulb of allium and a Saturday with nothing else in it?
Why do I need someone worse off before my own Tuesday counts as blessed? What kind of arithmetic is that, to need a minus before I'll believe in my own plus?
The hadith says look at those below you in worldly matters, not above, so you don't belittle what you've been given? But when I do it, what rises first isn't gratitude, isn't it relief, and hasn't relief never once knelt down to pray?
A marketer shows you someone thinner, richer, calmer, so the product can taste like the cure? I read a flood headline and murmur alhamdulillah into my own chest, and is that so different? What's a good argument for why those two mouths are saying different things, when all I have is a feeling, stubborn as salt in a wound, that they must be?
Eleven years selling flavor and fragrance for a living? Telling clients a competitor's vanilla tasted thin so ours could taste like scripture? Whose salt was I, all that time, and did I ever once ask the meat?
Who is the salt in my own life? Have I thanked them by name, or only by the shape of the absence they left in someone poorer than me?
Does the gratitude go anywhere, or does it just sit in the chest, pretty and useless, a coin nobody's spent?
Sedekah given so quietly the left hand never finds out? Alhamdulillah said once, then filed, then forgotten like a receipt? Which of these have most of mine actually been, and don't I already know, and aren't I asking anyway, the way you press a bruise to check if it still hurts?
Is it possible to taste sweetness without needing salt first? Has anyone I know actually managed this, or are we all just better at hiding how much comparison we still require?
My mother, gone almost a year now? Ordinary Tuesdays gone sharp since, seasoned by an absence I didn't order and can't send back? Is that a gift, or a bill I'm still working through, one stubborn juz at a time, on a debt that doesn't seem to shrink no matter what I recite into it?
Dzikir, meant to train the tongue past needing the wound first? Juz 22 of a Quran I'm reading partly for her? Some nights, is the training working, or have I just gotten more eloquent about the hunger?
Don't I still not have the next question? Isn't it true some of them need the salt to finish dissolving before they're even askable?
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