Brief notes on my lost senses

Thanks a lot, Covid.

            It is a strange thing to lose your sense of taste and smell.  Which is what has happened to me since I’ve had Covid.  When I take a bite of something, all I sense is a sort of bulk, an idea of texture.   Chicken “tastes” the same as corn.  If everything tastes the same, preferences no longer exist.  I am not able to like something more than something else, because I have no way to judge.  This is truly the ultimate “I eat to live.”  No wonder I’m losing weight.  Taste provides encouragement, and I have none.

            To realize that my nose and tongue have been neutered is bewildering.  As if two of my closest friends had died.  I am cut off from so much of the world.  My tongue and nose are blind.  I can sense bitterness when I taste something.  Saltiness.  Texture, as I say. Hot or cold.  Not taste.  The fact that a strawberry “tastes” the same as a blueberry is hard to fathom.  I know that is wrong.  But my body isn’t confirming it.  My body is telling me it’s normal that they “taste” the same.

            Which leads me to the thought: how do I know when something is spoiled?  I don’t.  In these circumstances, I could just as well eat rotten meat as fresh.  I can’t tell the difference.  This could be dangerous. 

            Am I not able to smell leaking gas?  Burning paper?

            Think of all the great works of art that wouldn’t exist had the artists been without a sense of smell and taste.  You can start with Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.  Young Marcel would not have been able to experience “the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her [his aunt’s] decoction of lime-flowers” and so summon “the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings.”  He would still be a frustrated, would-be writer, knowing that’s what he was meant to be but unable to do it.   We would be deprived of one of literature’s masterpieces.  We’d have Remembrance of Nothing.

            I realized last night that it doesn’t matter what I eat.  As long as I eat something.  How much tasteless food can you eat?  Is it even food?

            It’s odd.  I can remember tastes.  In my mind, I can summon so many.  

            I think of all the delightful tastes food provides.  Perfectly fried eggs, for example.  (James Beard’s choice of the one last meal he would have, if he had to choose one.)  The taste of the egg white, with its sheen and buttery flatness and a slight taste of salt.  And the yolk, the punctured sphere erupting over my plate in a rich, sunny yellow.  Throw in some undulating bacon, crisp, the taste of fat and pork justly balanced and so wonderful to bite into, and there you have it. 

            I can’t discern that now. 

            I am told your sense of taste and smell returns, eventually, with this Covid thing.

            I hope so.

            If not, I need to prepare myself for a world of sameness.