This morning, as I sometimes do, I had tea with breakfast, flipping on the electric stove in my apartment to start a kettle boiling. The distance from the stove to the cupboard was short, yet in that walk back I noticed the packet I had chosen — the brand of mint tea I had been buying and brewing for years — was not what I’d thought it was: what the company Bigelow had once called “Plantation Mint” was now “Perfectly Mint.”
I felt sick to my stomach (and not from any expectation of caffeine). I ran back to the cupboard and found an older mint packet tucked away by accident in the Pumpkin Spice box. Sure enough, my eyes were not deceiving me: the name of the tea had changed. Placing the two packets together — the same product, but (bought six months apart) manufactured under different contexts — raised in me questions of myself I had been uncomfortable acknowledging throughout 2020.