Fancy Tuna

Musings on the past and what does and doesn't deserve a ride into the present.

I read somewhere recently that the recession will take us all back to 2013.

Time travel! How exciting.

I, for one, am here for it.

In 2013, I was thinner and much less tired. I’d never heard of Covid or Brexit. The notion of a Trump presidency was confined to an obscure episode of The Simpsons.

I slept the sleep of the childless and spent my days much as I pleased, exploring one of the more interesting Southeast Asian countries. I knew how to speak Burmese, shit in a squat toilet and ride a motorcycle. I lived above a fruit market and, in durian season, the durians would pile on the roadside taller than me. You could smell them from my balcony. I would choose one and the guy with the long knife would splice it for me right there and pluck out the cheesy lobes of fruit inside. Fresh lobsters, confined to the domestic market by a lack of export freezing facilities, sizzled on open grills, for the equivalent of three dollars apiece.

Yes, life in 2013 was rich with possibilities and, in the noisiest corner of a noisy Asian city, also much quieter. It was the year before I leapt into motherhood and, looking back, 2013 me was just drunk on the state of being totally unfettered. 2023 me, in contrast, is entirely fettered about - good and bad - with job, love, children, home, mortgage, back pain.

That unfettered past is familiar, and totally alien. I share no molecules with 2013 me anymore, the last having presumably sloughed itself off in 2020. That’s another thing I read somewhere - that it takes seven years to switch out every single particle of your physical self. Every single bit: hands, heart, brain, everything. So 2013 me was effectively an entirely different human. Yet here I am, remembering the durians! Extraordinary.

My sister reminded me of this recently, over the holidays. Ruminating on the past, she asked me:

“Do you remember that phase you went through of adding cumin to your tuna?”

My reply was lively in the affirmative.

“I still do that sometimes! I call it Fancy Tuna.”

Some things are good to bring with us in our carry ons from the past. Fancy Tuna is one such thing (trust me).

Some things, like lobsters and durian, have to stay where they live, in the past, and that’s not because we don’t want them, just that their time has been and gone. Other things have to stay in the past because carrying them with us brings no good.

So, my new year’s resolution is to sort out the shit from the spicy tuna. I am striding into 2023, eating a Fancy Tuna sandwich and carrying with me only the smell of durians and sizzling lobster.

The past is a foreign country. Past me is foreign too, away in a foreign country.

But it’s all still me.