Random thoughts about mango memories

Sitting at my desk attempting to do some work. My mind won’t stop wandering and I can’t seem to focus. Distractions are all around me. I couldn’t seem to resist the temptation to eat all the chocolates, and once I did, I felt bad. So, I turned to the fruits and they aren’t quite ready yet. I picked up the mango and checked to see if it’s ripe… I snap off the stem and expose the bursting fruity smell. This is the smell of a green mango… This is the smell of Cambodian memories… This is the smell of home.
I hold the mango close to my nose and smell that one fresh area whilst closing my eyes. Memories are not purely flashing images. Memories are feelings, they’re experiences that let us remember how we felt at that time.
The smell of this green mango not only brought back the image of me eating loads of them whilst in Cambodia. The smell of this green mango brought back the taste, the feeling of biting into it, the way it made my tongue feel after eating too many; and mainly, it brought back the feelings of certain moments. It reminds me of sitting in my apartment in Phnom Penh with the doors wide open and the light shining in… It reminds me of watching my mum cooking, my brother playing guitar, my sister drawing, my neighbour singing, and offering them all some mango and we knew it made us feel a lot better… It reminds me of going for a walk in Sihanoukville town and finding some green mangoes at the side of the road and just sitting there watching people pass by… It reminds me of that day when all the staff in my school scraped burnt paint off the office walls and then the owner of the school came in with bags full of green mangoes and we all sat down and had a break and we genuinely didn’t care that we weren’t getting payed for it… It reminds me of when we were sitting outside of a small shop at 3am and a mango naturally fell off the tree beside us, we didn’t have a knife so we just used a key to cut it and eat it.

It reminds me of good times, good times that will come again, good times that may be masked as bad times or as nothing special, we just simply have to look out for them and acknowledge them.


Written by Sofia Tartaglia on the 11th of December 2016

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