The Memory I Wouldn't Let Go Of - Vanessa Hsu

There was a particular taste to mangoes that summer. They would spew juice, the stringy fibers in the fruit barely holding up as soon as our teeth sank in, and our hands would end up enveloped in orange pulp without even pressing that hard. Sometimes they'd be much sweeter than others, bordering on overripe -- there were so many mangoes that we would pick them up from underneath the tree shades instead of beating them all down with a stick while still hanging.

There was a particular smell to the air before the rain too (but it was always right before raining) -- thick and muggy, stuck to our nostrils. We'd try to cut through the heat with ice cream overdose, but even the ice cream would have trouble dripping down the few feet to the ground. The melted layer around the still-iced ice cream, thick like the air around us, would sluggishly slide down its own surface, eventually release and suspend itself midair for a few seconds, and then finally, forming a multicolor drip painting on the concrete below our feet. It seemed that everyone was eating and painting and raining ice cream.

The taste of the rain was also different. It was tropical rain -- a mesh of humidity surrounded us at all times and when it decided to fall, it was a delirious release, curtains of water, layers upon layers of delicious heavy drops so big our ice cream paintings would vanish in a second and the mangoes still on the ground were beaten down to pulp, releasing their sweetness as the fragrance that would then envelop everything around us.

It was nature's assault to my senses that summer, and the smells and tastes are stuck on me.