I have no idea how to even begin to pronounce “ageusia”, but I can tell you that it’s the medical name for losing your sense of taste.

For six terrifying days, when I was seventeen years old, I stopped tasting. Anything.

No, I didn’t have a cold. Trying to explain ageusia is very frustrating. Almost as frustrating as trying to explain sleep paralysis, that nocturnal horror at the heart of our succubus/incubus myths and alien abduction testimonies. A sensitive sort, at one time or another I’ve lost my taste and, in the night, my mind.

The hallucinations of sleep paralysis, however unsettling, vanish at sunrise: it’s a given. There’s no timetable for ageusia, though. When my sense of taste finally returned, as wholly as it had vanished, I had spent a nightmarish week googling (that’s an anachronism–it was 1999 and it might just as easily have been AltaVista) cancers of the nose and mouth, heaping spoon after spoon of sugar onto a blob of oatmeal that might as well have been sand, and picturing myself as Charles Wallace eating a turkey dinner on the planet Camazotz. (Any Madeleine L’Engle fans out there know what the hell I am talking about? I bet this blogger does.)

It wasn’t an allergy, or sinus congestion, or any other condition that might have muffled my sense of smell. My palate was dead as a doorknob, flat as a board. You could have thrown me, blindfolded, into the sea, and I would have sworn to you it was a lake.

I had a day a little like that today. I was not happy, and so I did what I often do when I am not happy: I went to the grocery store, and bought provisions. A pound of squid, a pile of chicken backs and necks, a dozen eggs, a ginger root and some star anise. I made Diana Kuan’s tea eggs, and a vat of white chicken stock. (So nice to make a stock that isn’t French. There was a time when the ever-present sweetness of mirepoix and bouquet bloody garni made me queasy.) When I was done skimming and degreasing my stock, I had plans for a rice vermicelli soup with sauteed squid, shelled edamame and a halved tea egg. (Noodle soup is the little black dress of cookery, to my mind. You can dress it up or down a thousand different ways with all manner of edible accessories, and it never goes out of style.) It was going to make me feel better. Much like this noodle soup had, two weeks ago, at a dai pai dong in Hong Kong:

Except it didn’t. My eggs turning out roughly a third as attractive as Diana’s notwithstanding, I couldn’t taste a thing. The stock tasted like the squid, which tasted like the edamame. Which is to say, like a whole lot of nothing. And it wasn’t for lack of seasoning, friends.

This isn’t the full-blown taste loss that rocked my world the year I first left home. All the same, it’s the body’s reaction to a heart’s decision. Everywhere, the muddy flavour of wet cardboard.

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