KIMCHI

It’s spicy, fermented, pickled(?) cabbage, eaten as a side dish or like a condiment. Chris loved it, but he typically loved spicy things. I didn’t know anything about kimchi, had never even heard of it, before Chris. I didn’t know a lot of stuff before Chris. I feel like I am a pretty adventurous eater. I’ve eaten gooey duck. I’ll try most of anything at least once. Except Kimchi. The first time Chris opened a jar of kimchi with me in the room, I thought for a moment that we had just been transported to the garbage dump. The smell. I couldn’t handle the smell, that rotten boiled garbage smell of old cabbage and I refused to try a bite of any of it. Chris and I would joke about smelly kimchi and his love of spicy smelly things. We had a story about the time I was woken up in the late hours of the night by the smell of kimchi. Chris had opened a jar of kimchi and he was on the other side of the house. We laughed about how kimchi was so smelly that it could wake a person on the other side of the house.

I think it was while I was on a trip to Portland, after Chris, when I finally ate kimchi. I hadn’t ordered it, nor expected it to be in the noodle dish I had ordered. I ate a large bite of it and was surprised at how delicious it was. I didn’t smell it in the food and I thought maybe I had imagined the whole smell thing. After that first taste, I made it a point to order it whenever it was on a menu. At times, I crave it. Not enough to ever have a jar of it in my fridge, but enough to seek it out at a restaurant. Michael doesn’t care for it. He is the one that turns his nose up at the mentioning of kimchi. He is the me before Chris. It’s funny and weird and at times, confusing.

Twelve years ago, I read Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. It was her second novel, her first being The Time Traveller’s Wife. That first book was the one that made Niffenegger a star. I still have a copy on my bedside table and have read it a multiple times. Her second book did not get the great reviews the first book received, and I didn’t enjoy reading it as much as the first book. Her Fearful Symmetry was hauntingly heartbreaking and strange. The story is about twin sisters who inherit a flat in London from their aunt, their mother’s twin and a woman they have never met. They learn family secrets that change their lives, while the spirit of their aunt haunts the flat. Eventually the aunt’s spirit takes over one of the twins, pushing that girl’s spirit out to haunt the flat. It’s a weird story, but I think of it often even though I didn’t really care for it. At times I find myself slightly fixated on the idea of two spirits in one body.

There are so many things that were quintessential Chris that I just sort of absorbed. You guys remember how Chris could just be sitting, quietly observing and listening to us and then suddenly deliver the perfect, most hilarious one liner relating to whatever it was we were all talking about? Now I am the one quietly observing and listening. My one liners are sharp and hilarious but only half as much as the one’s Chris could deliver. I still manage to make those around me dissolve into laughter. I’ve also taken over Chris’s habit of procrastinating, wasting hours of my time playing word games instead working on the things I am always saying I need to work on. There are other things, feelings, reactions that feel more like Chris’s than my own, that makes me wonder for a moment if my body is inhabited with two spirits.

We went to the Asian Food Market on Saturday for rice noodles because I’m making Pad Kee Mao for dinner one night this week. Here’s the thing with the Asian Food Market. You go in for one thing, but you end up with twenty things in your cart. While Michael and the Cabbage were picking out misago and seaweed, I wandered over to the kimchi refrigerator. So, now a jar of kimchi lives in my fridge at home. A small jar. A small smelly jar of spicy, pickled napa cabbage. I’ve opened the jar once already so I could mix some in with my leftover fried rice. I did so quickly so as not to fill my tiny house with the smell of kimchi.

Then I laughed at myself, imagining Chris doing the same thing.