saturday night/sunday morning

Last night I cooked my first legitimate meal in my new apartment. Nothing special-just a stir fry. I've been having a strange time adjusting to this place; not out of regret or uncertainty, just...it didn't feel exactly like I thought it would. It didn't feel like "that place" I'd slowly make my own.

My kitchen is a bit cramped so, naturally, cooking in these new dimensions will require some new maneuvers and counter top space rationing skills. Balancing spices on the coffee maker, knives balanced just right on the rim of the sink for easy access, ingredients tightly assembled like an infantry awaiting orders—nothing new, I suppose, for anyone in a new kitchen who thinks they know what they're doing.

Somewhere between taking notes on how to manage this new space and tossing cuts of chicken and pepper in a pan, something marvelous happened. I cut into an onion. A big onion. Typically, cutting into a small onion in a big kitchen, unless one is prepared, would result in fumes stinging one's eyes and the general facial spasms associated with crying and yawning at the same time. Therefore, cutting a big onion in a small kitchen fucking hurts.

Right after the regret of the fumes came the revelation of the smell. The smell brought me back to my apartment in Milan, helping my Italian roommate cut up vegetables for dinner, the opening bottles of wine, the billiard-crack bubbling of salted water. That time before dinner when everything was just smells and promises made me feel distant and comfortable, that once I got through dinner I would be fully prepared to handle anything (or too full and euphoric to really care). The diced onions, the searing chicken, the oils sweating out their flavors, none of this provides any armor to the next day or the next term paper, the hassle of things breaking or expectations to meet. They provide acceptance and encourage wisdom, the blissful realization that it's all one thing after another, each random and logical consequence following as it may.

I like my kitchen.