I’ve been making a lot of golden milk recently, enjoying the ritual of grating fresh turmeric and ginger and dates, with a pinch of black pepper, and a touch of honey to round out the sweetness.

It’s a ritual that feels as cozy as a fireplace warming a cold winter’s night.

Sometimes, I wonder if this milk means more than a drink to me.

When the bitter turmeric carries the sourness of the world,
or the tang of ginger, the displacement of hope,
the sweetness of dates, the abandonment of civil disposition,
or the saccharine honey, the expectation of unlived promises.

I wonder, that is, whether a simple drink carries the world in its ochre stains. That when I grate the turmeric and it leaves my fingers yellow-stained, that I am marking myself somehow with the expectation that it will change me into something else entirely.

That I will somehow be made different by the condensing of ingredients into something consumable.

By: Rania Hanna

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