COCOA AT SUMMER CAMP

I often remember lunch time at summer camp and the cocoa I would sip every afternoon.

I remember it, yet I remember nothing: neither the scent, nor the taste, nor the stories from that camp. 

And still, I keep returning to that cocoa. I miss that cocoa, and its taste and its smell and the stories I cannot remember, but somehow know I should miss, because they have already become distant from me now, estranged, overshadowed by adulthood. 

The camp was in Tskneti, at the end of the mountain. 

There was a yellow building with many windows, a large yard, flying cockroaches, and the sound of children screaming. The back side faced a cemetery, the front side faced a settlement of families displaced by the war in Abkhazia.

But we were children. We knew nothing about death and nothing about displacement, so all summer long we screamed and sang and rejoiced. And every afternoon, we soothed our voices, roughened from singing, with cocoa.

This bag is my lunch at summer camp and the cocoa whose taste I no longer remember, but miss so, so much.