Yesterday I had such a craving for Noodle World’s tom kha gai bowl. For about six dollars, I could get a huge container of the soup, and it was my go-to on heavy design days, on days when the ARG was live and hopping. The soup was nourishing, and the noodles messy, and the small lump of chili paste needed to be stirred in so that my sinuses would sing and my head would clear.

Trouble is, Noodle World’s in Pasadena, and I am a few time zones and thousands of miles out of the way. I wrote yesterday about the surprise I am feeling over L.A. nostalgia, and the taste of those noodles hit me as the temps dropped here to within ten degrees above freezing.

So, I stopped by Sushi-Thai last night, the old stand-by for takeout sushi when I worked at Epic before, when we were in the middle of crunch. It’s a nice place, but I’d never tried their Thai offerings before. I drove over right after work and placed the order at the hostess desk, playing games on my phone until my Philly roll and soup were ready.

And while the soup is just soup, with no sumptuous glob of noodles to pry apart from the bottom, the chili paste a bit lacking, the chicken not quite as tender, the lemongrass all but nonexistent, it was still nice to have the taste, the warmth, the memory of a time when I was in the thick of things. That walk down the street in Old Pasadena was always a measured, lung-clearing walk up Colorado, see, a way for me to leave the office for just a few minutes during a hectic live update day. But by the time I’d get my bubble tea and the white plastic bag knotted at the top with all the lunch-construction materials inside (soup separate from noodles, see, to keep everything fresh), I’d be ready to hoof it back down to my desk, hungry not only for lunch, but for the next moments in the game.

The taste of coconut and heat and astringent herby lemongrass will always taste like the adrenaline rush of thousands of people converging together on a narrative. All of it a cacophony, chaos, ordered ruin, denouement, a weaving of ideas, new concepts. Harmony through distillation of the mystery. Tiny mushroom caps and the red swirl of chili.