I have a craving for food that’s beyond and after hunger. I want to taste but not to have it go through me, touch me, reach to grab as it slides down. I don’t want it cold or hot on my tongue, crumbly, soft or dry in my teeth. I want just the taste, as a whispery thing, like smoke but thinner than smoke. Anorectic girls, wiry and smart and brooding, must feel like this all the time. There’s a mad twinkle to this thought, anyway: you want to touch but not to consume, to feel but never to feed.

This is how the second day of diets looks like. Strong diets, resolute, permanent, like oak tree roots squeezing the earth. Strong diets are insane, insane. But not feeding and insanity are the same, if the body were allowed to speak; it screams against it with every little spark of its primordial, hidden parts. In little insane moments like this, when you know the ancient mind will yield to you, that it has lost before you even fought it, you feel like this — like a pretty, insane little girl. You want the spirit of things to remain on the tip of your tongue, but their flesh and matter fade from you. You practice saying no to the mad, insistent feeding frenzy of the world. You brood about it. You find strength in brooding.

It’s times like these I think of saffron. It’s never a taste — not in the way spiciness is just a very small pain, but in a more substantial way. You can grapple with its slippery intricacies, you’ll never pin its taste down. It’s both dreamy and light on the roof of your mouth. It hides at times in other tastes, other sensations of the mouth: you lose its trail behind the hardness in bread, and where the juiciness of soft, soft risotto begins. You find it in your mouth, later, in the next dish, like LSD coming back to visit or a ferret peeping from a hole in the ground. It’s red and it’s yellow and it’s really neither yellow-tasting nor red-tasting, and it’s like smoke or like vinegar but like nothing really, just this feeling — of royalness. There’s something festive and austere to it, like the wide swing of a conductor’s wand and trumpets suddenly sounding. This you are sure of: this fancy arc in the air when it touches saffron.

Maybe hunger, mad hunger that is, anorectic-like, is the search for the taste of saffron. This thread — scarlet, no less — hidden under coarser scents and waiting to be hungered for, to be stripped of all tastes and scents for. I want to go look for it even if it’s hiding in dark, dark, heavy woods.

This is what the next few months are about.