October, 1993
This is the part she can’t remember the details of. She imagines that there was food, unopened, in the kitchen, that she was wearing her favorite outfit – or perhaps that by this point she had changed out of it. It never occurred to her at the time that her mother, in another room, might be aching as she was aching, but years have broadened her view to the rest of the house, outside her cluttered bedroom, and she can see in her memory her mother in the kitchen with all of the food – and a cake? – and perhaps rented videos on the table, her mother’s heart breaking a little as the wails come from the cluttered bedroom. Inconsolable wails.

It was her thirteenth birthday party, and no one had shown up.

August, 2005
Her laughter reaches him just as he walks into the room to find her seated at his desk, holding a snapshot.

“Where did you get this?” she asks, her pleasure written clearly across her face.

“Andrew gave it to me. He’d found some old film and had it developed and it turned out to be pictures he took in high school.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know… A junior, maybe?”

She cannot explain the joy she feels allowing her eyes to linger on this adolescent version of her lover, the huge nose that the rest of his face had not yet grown into, the glasses that covered half his face, the poise of his hands near the bottom of the frame, as though they had been captured in the midst of explaining something.

She knows of his childhood, growing up poor, the unplanned son of hippies who had been too laid back to expect much of him. She knows of the angry outbursts that had sent him to the child psychologist (though she saw nothing of that now), the long curly hair that, as a small boy, had led him to be mistaken for a girl. She knows it and she feels tender toward this awkward black and white boy, and she is happy the next day to find that he’s placed the photo under a magnet on the door of the freezer.

Her eyes fall on the photo again and again as she moves about his kitchen, gathering ingredients for dinner, measuring spices into a bowl of yogurt and limejuice.

“Did you know,” she asks him, “that there are three basic components to a marinade?”

“No, I didn’t. What are they?”

“You have to have some kind of base – like yogurt – and then something acidic, like lime juice. And then whatever spices you want to use. And that’s it. Beyond that it’s all up to your own creativity.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I just read it.” She turns again toward the photo. He keeps a set of alphabet magnets on the fridge, and she has carefully arranged H, O, and T across the bottom of the print, which has made him laugh. “If I knew him,” she says, “I would take off those glasses and kiss his eyelids.”

“You would scare the shit out of him. I was terrified of girls. Sometimes I’m not entirely sure I’m not now.”

“What did you think about when you masturbated?”

“I don’t know, girls…”

“I bet it was really innocent stuff, like holding hands.”

He laughs.

“I would have corrupted you. I liked corrupting the dorky boys in high school.” She looks at the childish face, the unkissed lips, and feels some sort of attraction, not exactly sexual, but not devoid of sexuality either. “You were hot. Does that make me a pedophile?”

He laughs again and she cannot say that what is masquerading as physical attraction toward his youthful visage is actually a deep and painful empathy.

The chicken sits for hours in yogurt, lime juice, minced garlic, grated ginger, coriander, and cumin while they walk down Bardstown Road from their favorite coffee shop to the Indian grocery. When they return to the house with paratha and charcoal the kitchen smells of the garlic and ginger root she has left on the counter. She took particular pleasure in mixing the marinade herself, thinking to herself that cooking – something she’d renounced well into her early twenties – is actually a lovely form of art. But now she lets him help with the parts that interest her less, preparing the rice and grilling the chicken. When they finally eat together they taste all of it, the spices she has measured, the chicken he has skewered, the flat Indian bread that they bought frozen and that he placed on his head as they walked back from the grocery, a defense against the lingering evening heat. They agree that this recipe is worth repeating.

Later, the kitchen clean, the clock pushing steadily on into the early morning hours, she says, “I think I will sleep on the couch.”

“Okay,” he says, and she goes into the living room, removes the overstuffed pillows, and spreads out the quilt. This is where she is forced to stop pretending; her ex-lover enjoys her company, is still her best friend – is still in love with her – but will not share his bed with her. She has not chosen the couch over his bed, but over the drive back to her own.

As she is pulling off her shorts he appears at the end of the hallway. “Do you want to come in here?”

“Yes,” she says, and joins him on the lumpy futon, the orange sheets and green afghan reminding her of carrots.

Everything omitted is yours to fill in. She can’t tell you of the disappointments, resentments, longings, the ways that he is everything and nothing that she wants, and vice versa. Unreasonable sacrifices perched on a precipice, waiting to be made. She can tell you that this night he talks of his fears, and with her head on his bare chest tears flow out of her and soak his skin. And the reason that she is crying is that it isn’t her at all, nor him, in that bed, that carrot, clutching each other and being afraid. She is crying for what is in her, concealed by a good haircut and a bit of fashion sense, the aching unwanted thirteen year old, and her head is on the chest of a high school junior with an ill-fitting nose. She floats above the bed and looks down on this scene and cries with the sheer relief of feeling wanted, of being understood, and for all the pain he ever felt, and less so for all of hers.