—
ふるさとの
においがしみた
やさしい味
flavors of home—
soft with the scent
of all I used to be
—
I don’t eat it often.
But when I do, it happens without warning.
The first spoonful, and I’m gone.
Not physically, of course. I’m still wherever I am—at the kitchen table, or some café that tried to bottle nostalgia in enamelware and neutral-toned playlists. But inside? I’m barefoot again. In a tiled kitchen back in Slovenia, where the windows barely closed, and the wind moved like it belonged.
The dish?
Polenta with warm milk and coffee.
A bit of salt.
A swirl of bitterness.
No sugar.
It sounds like nothing.
But nothings can be entire worlds, quietly held together by memory and steam.
—
I must’ve been five or six the first time I tasted it.
My mother served it in a chipped ceramic bowl with a faded blue rim.
One of those bowls that stays because it always stayed.
The spoon was too big for my hand, but I didn’t mind.
It felt like being trusted.
She didn’t say much, just: “Eat before it cools.”
And the house around me did its usual choreography—my father fixing something with electrical tape, the radio murmuring softly, a drafty breeze sneaking through the back door. It was winter, but not unkind.
Only years later did I learn: she always stirred a bit of butter into the polenta.
She never mentioned it.
But it made all the difference.
—
Years later, I tried to remake it.
This time, in Ljubljana.
I was just seventeen. Rented a shared room in Šiška, right next to the main bus line, where ambulance sirens sliced the night open like clockwork. The windows were thin, and the walls felt tired. It was cold—not the romantic kind, but the kind that seeped into your socks and made you boil tea just to warm your hands.
Back then, I used to go running through Tivoli park with what were basically just regular shoes—nothing made for running, really. Just the same sneakers I wore to lectures and cafés. But I ran anyway, because it was one of the only times I felt like I could leave something behind.
That winter, I made polenta with milk and coffee for the first time by myself.
The polenta clumped. The milk bubbled too much.
It still worked. It still warmed me.
It still whispered, you’re still here.
—
And then again—another version, years later.
In Birmingham.
I was living in a shared student flat near Aston, the kind of place where toast attracted ants if you left it unsupervised.
The kitchen was damp, someone was always trying to clean it but never quite succeeding.
The supermarkets were worse.
So I started walking behind the Bull Ring to the old open market where old men still shouted prices over crates of eggs and sad-looking cabbages.
I didn’t have any real cooking skills back then.
Bought some discounted vegetables, confused spices, and asked my Indian roommate how to cook them.
He laughed, then explained.
And in that moment—somewhere between learning how to cut onions and avoid overcooking rice—I felt a kind of strange love for the human capacity to teach one another.
I tried to make the polenta again there too.
It didn’t taste like home.
But it tasted like trying, and sometimes that’s close enough.
—
Wabi-sabi Lesson
You can run in shoes not meant for running.
You can cook in kitchens with ants.
You can find warmth in soup that doesn’t taste quite right.
You can remember something not for how perfect it was,
but for how honestly you tried to remake it.
—
Now, when I sit down to eat that simple bowl—when I even think about it—it’s not just polenta, milk, and coffee.
It’s a thousand small rooms.
Cold apartments with bad heating.
Tivoli in late autumn.
A flea-market bowl on a second-hand desk.
A roommate explaining turmeric like it was treasure.
A market stall behind a train station.
The steam of the past reaching back through time to say:
“You were becoming. You didn’t even know it.”
—
So, no—
I don’t eat it often.
But when I do,
it carries every quiet version of me
who kept going, even when they weren’t sure why.
life 