It was like suddenly seeing yourself in there, as if you in one of those mirrors that makes
your head look enormous and the rest of your body look like a peanut that hasn’t been
popped out of its shell yet.
It was like your brain finding heads and nuts similar and leading you back to a
consideration of nuts, like an earworm but a brain worm or some sort of brain ouroboros
which eats everything not just itself.
It was like not being able to forget about peanuts and deliberately trying to make the next
thought about something other than nuts, maybe about a dog or some children or the problem
of kites.
It was like realising that you weren’t the only person without a nut allergy in a world full
of people and allergens, everyone obsessed with the impossibility of any peaceful accord
between the two.
~
It was like understanding a joke without knowing exactly why it was funny but feeling
the rumble of a laugh approaching from just above your diaphragm and knowing that it was
right and true and that one day you would know why.
It was like trying to tell a joke to someone who was still cross with you for something
that you’d done the day before but was still as raw to them as if it had only just happened and
you know that they will have to laugh and forgive you.
It was like the possibility of forgiveness was present inside everyone, like laughter, and
made a noise similar to some very expensive luggage that was only half full falling down
some stairs and landing the right way up.
It was like there wasn’t any need for forgiveness actually, because just being distracted
from everything and being aware that you have an inside separate from the outside is like
when a laugh is really you just smiling out loud.
~
It was like remembering that one way to get rid of an earworm is to listen to the whole
song and so you get up and forage in the cupboard for a bag of nuts and bring it back to the
chair where you are reading.
It was like reading may contain nuts on the back of a packet of cashew nuts and thinking
hold on, aren’t these seeds?! which would make that warning less of a meme and
more the prompt for an existential crisis and aren’t they really the same thing?
It was like braving the internet to see if cashew nuts really are seeds and finding that
pistachio nuts are seeds and walnuts are seeds and almonds are seeds and coming to
understand why botanists don’t write the warnings on food labels.
It was like thinking of the paths your life would have to have taken for you to be a
botanist now and for this musing about seeds to be something you would be paid for instead
of something that has interrupted your reading and laughter and being forgiven.