An Open Letter to Anthony Bourdain
What hadn't you found yet, Tony?
Or perhaps it was that you had found it everywhere. Carried it with you. The stony weight of our many, many hearts.
In truth, I never watched your show. Never gave you a chance. I was fonder of Andrew Zimmern, who wrote: "Tony was a symphony."
I only ever caught glimpses of you, chain smoking and grumbling in the steam-filled alleys of Oita or squatting over a meal prepared by Native Australians, the ashes tumbling in the bush, or in Arica, where the mudslides from spring storms gathered their dirty dewdrops in your nostrils, or... or...
What was it, Tony? What was it that burbled and blended in? The complex mole of your brown-eyed, struggle-laced, avocado leaf and cocoa co-mingling ache.
That itch that defied drugs, that couldn't be surmounted by red-eye flights carrying you across distances you had not touched.
My brother called you a legend. An insult really. The only time he had ever mentioned your name came with the news that you had died.
What was it that your tongue had tasted that you hadn't shared with us? That insatiable wanderlust of running, running like the water for a broth not-yet made. Yàn wō on a stove, bubbling up into your untearing eyes.
There is loneliness everywhere, Tony. At every table. In every bowl. Spoon-fed in heaps to far-off corners that cower and keep.
I miss your surly malaise, Tony. I miss the ways you did not touch my life. I share that yearning to go. To search. To travel and gobble up all that we cannot capture in our teeth. Too much to chew. Too much... Too...
Too like you, Tony. The unalleviated pain. The parts left unknown.







