The Palate of a Forgetting

Fiction

Sit still. The needle is small. The extraction is smaller. You want this gone. Why? Because it hurts. Because the ghost of a nineteen year old girl is still haunting your breakfast. You think you are paying for peace; you are actually paying for a hole. I slide the vial open. Most first loves are cloying. They taste like static and wet pavement. They are sugary in a way that makes the teeth ache. But yours? Yours is a rare vintage. I can see it shimmering in the glass: a thick, iridescent gelatin that refuses to settle. I take a sip. It does not taste like fruit or chocolate. It tastes like the exact moment you realized you were not the center of her world. It is a cold, metallic tang. It has the texture of crushed velvet soaked in salt. There is a note of oxidized copper here, mixed with the sharp ozone of a summer storm that never actually broke. It is the flavor of a promise kept for three years too long. I swallow. I can feel the memory settling in my gut. A small, shimmering weight of someone else's grief. It is an acquired taste. Most people prefer the blandness of a forgotten childhood pet or the sourness of a failed exam. But a first love? That is a feast. It is rich. It is heavy. It lingers on the back of the tongue like a secret you cannot tell. Now, look at yourself in the mirror. Look at the space where that feeling lived. It is a clean room now. A white wall. You are lighter. You are also smaller. You have the expression of a man who just woke up from a dream he cannot remember, and you are terrified because you know you lost something valuable. Do not look at me with those hollow eyes. You paid for the void. Do not complain that it feels empty. That is the definition of the service.