M0R1BUND

My friend,

What they don’t tell you about immortality is that your body forgets how to want. You won’t notice what you’ve become numb to until it’s too late. You will go months without eating or drinking and wonder why the things that once brought you joy have emptied themselves of meaning. My friends in the younger generation tell me that this is called “depression.” When I learned this, it came to me all at once, as if in a dream—why the gods of my ancestors slaughtered one another, why Old Mora chases disaster, why the Io must have their tyrannical heart devoured each summer. None of them have had a fruity drink in what I imagine to be hundreds of years.

It’s perverse, and wrong, and I won’t stand for it. I am a hedonistic street-rat at heart and I believe this is my only moral calling. The moment god forgets the taste of honey mesquite is the moment god decides all other creatures are meaningless noise. What awful delusions we suffer when eternity stares us down!

I am writing to you now while nursing a glass of non-alcoholic cidrecane. Addiction precludes me from the drink. I’m aware of the irony. After reading what I have written, my boyfriend sampled my cup and said “This is just apricot cider,” and then advised me to send this letter “without the diatribe,” which means that I will send it as it is.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I enjoy a little bit of everything. My latest vice is vaatlil, a fizzy juice of berries, bitters, and caribou blood that comes from West Scaiuq. This is what they serve foreigners who can’t keep pure caribou blood down. It’s delicious, but even still I can’t drink much, because I have the “thin stomach of a farmer” in the words of my boyfriend. (I’m not young anymore. After my last brush with lichen cheese, I know better than to try to prove my “Sarikote-ness” to him.) 

When I’m in the city, molchi and cha yen satisfy my sweet tooth. Herbal teas satisfy my need to seem sophisticated. I also enjoy coffee and maté, but I rarely drink them, as they cause me to become very stupid. I am now being teased because I drink “disgustingly sweet mocktails that would stop the hearts of lesser men.” This is untrue. I have made myself ill before and I will make myself ill again. “Spoken like a true masochist.” Can a man not write a letter without the dawn chorus crowing about his inability to distinguish love from pain?

I digress. These days I am spending more time on the East Coast, where I grew up. Many things have not survived these past hundred years, and what hasn’t died is doomed to meet a more mediocre end. My favorite teahouse, for example, serves a tepid mockery of what I drank in my youth. Nahe. I miss it, but only a little. This is the other thing they don’t tell you about immortality—what grows in spring is watered by your winter tears, and it will be sweeter than you remember. I never had Sati-Xanti food until an elderly couple opened a bodega at the end of the street. They serve a miawe-flavored molchi that would make me forgive Motu.

You must come visit sometime and try it. (The molchi, not forgiving Motu.)