“The sex was vanilla,” my friend says, laughing at the mediocrity of a date the previous evening. I commiserate, holding back the knowledge springing to my mind that “vanilla” comes from the Latin vagina, meaning sheath; that will not ease my friend’s dissatisfaction.

We continue chatting, going over the details of the night before – a halfhearted kiss at the doorstep of a bar, followed by perfunctory sex as two bodies moved in uninterested rhythms. When I take my leave, my eyes catch the orchid growing in the windowsill, and I think of the phrase again, vanilla sex. Once more I hold my tongue, remembering that vanilla is an orchid from the mountains of Mexico – orchids, the flowers that inspire passion, beauty, mystery. From the Greek orchis, or testicle. The disjunct hovers in my mind.

Vanilla, the orchid; the name glows with a reproductive yearning, like when the bee slips in between the soft white petals to pollinate the flower the whole world seems to crave – that smell, that taste, ineffable and desired. Our tongues all cry out for it: vanilla, vanilla, vanilla.

There is another name, from the indigenous Totonacs: caxixanth, meaning hidden flower. Named because vanilla blooms for only one day out of the year, tucked into its mountain forest home, releasing the scent we now associate with ice cream shops and cheap perfume. The flower is still hidden, hidden behind chemical mimics and the cartoon drawings on grocery store flavor boxes, masked by its own ubiquity, so much so that it becomes an absence of flavor, an emptiness, like boring, emotionless, tragically vanilla sex.

And still we ask for more, sending Madagascan farmers into the fields to hand-pollinate their crops, slipping their fingers deftly into soft flowers to ensure that there are more vanilla beans, more vanilla flavor, trying to supply the unreached apex of our desire. Meanwhile, others look for ever-newer ways to make the flavor, the scent, from something else: from wood pulp, from petrochemicals, from prunes, whichever thrills might trick our hungry mouths.

Now in my own kitchen, I drop vanilla into dough, watching the liquid concentrate slip out of the metal teaspoon. You are there with me, watching; the kitchen is too small for the both of us to cook, and I see that smile that happens when you forget about work and family and all the rest, a quiet smile, meant for both of us. I lean into you as you come to slide a finger along the edge of the mixing bowl, catching a bit of the dough before I shoo you away. Later, when we kiss, our bodies fall into one another, collapsing into a messy comfort on the couch. The flavor of cookies and each other lingers on our lips.

We are tired, unimaginative that night, but when we are done I hold you close, skin on skin in the long moments before sleep. Outside my apartment walls, car horns sound and people shout, and we lay with each other, giggling as the night grows old and the morning arrives, young again. And in the daylight, when I press against you one last time, I can still smell vanilla flowers, faintly, and I like to think it’s from the night before, even if it’s only a fragrance in your shampoo. I watch you walk to your car and I think of the quietness of joy. The mundanity of it. Vanilla, perhaps.

But the other vanilla. The hidden one.