daylight savings
I miss cooking with you.
copenhagen last year. Sun breathes her last gasp at 4PM. the wind whipped itself silly and we stayed stagnant on our bikes, flailing. You’d be surprised that for a city that bred avant-garde cuisine, Danish food was primarily light on seasoning, low on the flavors we grew up eating. I tried to assimilate, but I couldn’t handle a daily ritual of rye bread and cooking became my lifeline.
I’d cling to bottles of soy sauce and gochujang from the Asian grocery store 20 minutes away.
I miss our conversations over boiling soup and simmering cabbage. How many times did we parrot wow. i love cabbage back and forth to each other? The simple We had so many questions about the next stage of life: would we make friends? Would we be still creative? What are we outside of the classes we take and the books we read? What is love? What does love look like?
No one tells you the first year on your own you lose the will to cook again. The joy of cooking is cooking with others, for others. All those funny flourishes you did in upstate.
You cook batches of pasta and curry that wither away in the fridge.
It is difficult to repeat this practice in this city. There are unlimited options for food, an endless queue of friends to catch up with and cultivate.
In my new apartment, I barely have space to cut vegetables.
Sometimes you ask rhetorical questions you don’t really reflect back upon. So much easier to speculate before a moment happens, harder to reflect in the middle of its happening.
Sometimes I wonder about what we owe to each other, as friends.
But in the kitchen, there is no worry that I am taking too much from you or vice versa. Even if one meal
friends are soup. our friendship simmering together.