How to Eat a Green Papaya Salad, if you are me

How to eat a Green Papaya Salad, if you are me.

(I am not exaggerating.)

(also, FYI, it was delicious.)

Get lost in Vientiane after dark. While you are walking vaguely southward, in hopes of finding a street you recognize, pass a popular-looking food stall. Stop, watch a moment, ask the woman in charge what they are making.

"Papaya salad" she says, in limited English. "You like? I'll make it not spicy for you."

"I like spicy!" you declare and give her a thumbs up like the fool that you are. "Spicy." Again, just to drive the point home.

She grins. "OK."

You sit down and wait. You like green papaya salad. You have had it in the US and it is sour and salty and very crisp. Just the perfect thing for a light dinner on a hot night.

Your salad arrives. It has peanuts and little shrimps and black fermented river crab and so on and it looks fantastic.

You take a bite.

For the first, maybe, half second you get all the familiar-but-better pleasant sensations of eating a favorite dish in its home country. Then there is a shockwave of pain.

It's not spicy. You don't parse it like that at first. It parses as pain; injury. Something is wrong.

Then it dulls a moment and you're mouth isn't fountaining blood and you realize you shouldn't have asked for the spicy.

But fuck, what are you going to do? Just walk away like some asshole foreigner who didn't know what he was getting into? No.

You take another bite.

Every single part of your mouth that you ever burnt on hot tea, that you ever brushed wrong, or flossed too hard, alerts you aggressively to its existence. There is a huge explosion in your left cheek where you didn't even know you bit your cheek the other day. Violent, searing pain oh.

This is okay. You like spicy food. You can dissociate yourself from the pain a bit, let the experience wash over you and through you. You breath deep -- once, twice.

You take another bite.

The intensity is not stopping. It's ramping up. The last two bites had peanut in them -- it must have helped calm the spice a bit. This one has a crab's leg, and it is even more intense, filling the back of your throat with bitterness and then, oh, more pain.

Ahah! you think. Clearly these side greens are to calm the heat a bit. You eat a piece of the cabbage you got served on the side. Against the waves of pain, it does nothing. You can't taste it and you can barely feel it.

And now, again, the pain.

You look on the plate and see a tomato. Clearly, yes, a tomato, something cool.

You take another bite.

The tomato bursts in your mouth with cool satisfaction filling every corner. And then, wham. You don't know how the hell they got a tomato to be spicy but there it is, all over your mouth and tongue, nowhere to hide.

You shudder, your eyes not focusing, and grab the sides of the table. You mumble a safeword an old lover taught you, the pain doesn't give a fuck about safewords but at least but it helps focus your mind. You look down.

You should stop this. You need to stop this.

You take another bite.

You realize that the top of your lip is in pain. What's going on? Somehow the spice has gotten into your sinuses, and the snot running out of your nose is spicy and burning its way through your upper lip. You fumble with the napkin dispenser on the little plastic table, pulling off too large a wad, trying to wipe your nose, and you just end up smearing it everywhere.

You gulp down the water that you presciently ordered -- the entire bottle in one go. The pain abates for that moment, and then comes back.

It's okay, you think. You can handle this. It will be a good story later. You can tell people on G+.

You take another bite.

You deleriously realize, as you squirm and struggle with this mouthful, that you're brain is probably rewiring itself to be able to understand this experience. Random old sensations are being dulled and forgotten to give you the ability to process the sheer amount of agony in your mouth right now. You are destroying yourself, turning yourself into a creature that can only feel pain in its mouth and lips.

There's a word for that, you were writing about it, but you can't remember it now. Maybe it's gone. Maybe those neurons are helping you feel this now.

You take another bite.

You are a damned soul. This is hell. This is the experience of hell: this, always.

You vaguely realize that the back of your throat hurts, like the spice has somehow gotten back there, and now won't leave. You can feel the oil burning its way down, slowly rolling.

You try to stand and walk away but you can't control your legs.

You take another bite.

This one must have had extra pepper in it or something, because it is fucking intense. Even though your whole mouth is throbbing in agony now, it manages to break through that to give new, intense sensations over the left half of your mouth. You can feel the nerve endings giving up, feel your jaw muscles twisting and shaking and failing to cope. Your eyes unfocus and maybe roll back.

You realize that this pain is nothing, that it is just the agitation of capsicum on your nerves and then your nervous system, there there is nothing here, nothing real.

You take another bite.

You realize that the world isn't here, isn't real. Not only is there no pain, there is no you. You become enlightened.

This makes the next several bites much easier to get down, until you reach one of the little crab torsos on the bottom.

Those things must have some special intensity in them because holy fuck. You say "oh God oh God" but let's be real, God doesn't exist, and if He did, why should He help you? It was Your own decisions got you into this mess. Free will.

Free will.

You take another bite.