Tiny Pantry

The waking nightmare: something kills you slower but doesn’t give you any new lines to speak with your extra time. So I go back over the old dialogue and hunt for Easter eggs.

Once in an undergrad writing workshop I prayed for a professor to make me drop to the ground and start doing push-ups till they either screamed at me to give them twenty more or to get the hell out of their sight. Either way I wouldn’t have to hear the word liminal or the phrase but have you earned that ending again. Sometimes, I just want to take space that’s for beauty and make it do work.  

Same with our wedding day. At the last minute, I asked my mom to braid my hair in the parking garage outside of the courthouse. I wore a dress that I bought with the Twin Peaks revival (and not marriage) in mind. I didn’t look like a princess, I looked like myself. It was myself that was marrying you. 

 

Even when we planned our wedding party much later, it was pieced together with patches, held at the restaurant where I worked. The kitchen boys made Korean fried chicken and handmade pierogies and kimchi pancakes. Dre made a huge vat of mezcal punch and Jaime baked a cake with the last of the season’s rhubarb. It wasn’t about if the marriage was going to work. The wedding worked. We made a playlist with Put It On Me and Love Will Tear Us Apart on it and failed to see the dual omens we were flirting with--but the ripped internet failed after ten songs, and we put Sade on the boombox instead. The Sade CD was there because the entire restaurant staff agreed to bump it during Mother’s Day brunch. We reasoned that it was the one album that every last one of our mothers loved.

The waking nightmare is that whether or not you earned this ending, it’s the one we got. In January, you will have been dead for four years. You were not always good at practicing kindness in the house, but you told me the cure for everything was to get out of the house, anyway. That’s where people loved you. Out. Driving around with extra coats in the car, picking up hacks, giving away cameras (or other people’s motorcycles) to dudes you met once. Asking a stranger for a lighter and then spending the day with them, or moving in with them, or dating their daughter, or inheriting their busted old Cadillac. So I dedicate this space to you: Not a princess. 

(Food in the Tiny Cabinet is free to anyone who’d like it for these two weeks. Please feel free to add anything nonperishable you have to spare, and please tell your undergrad students.)