i cook to remember

Every now and then I think I want to include a personal essay. I wanted to dedicate this one to my best friend, A. I love you.

I know many can go without breakfast, but I can't — especially on the weekends. This is when I eat to remember my family. No, they aren’t dead. Dealing with your parents' divorce as an adult hits you differently. Your entire family separates. Mine did. We all live alone. My mother, father, sister, and brother, we are alone, in our apartments, all within a 1 hour radius. I speak to my mother daily and visit my brother occasionally, but we are alone.

There was a time when we were not. Things were far from perfect in my family — they were dystopian, actually. But there was solace in eating breakfast together every weekend. Every Saturday morning, my father or mother would thunderously open the door to my room, that was a whirlwind tornado of clothes on the floor, and ask me if I wanted bacon. Grumbling my order, I stayed in bed until my nonverbal brother banged on the door to let me know breakfast was ready.

With teeth brushed and hair unbrushed, in pajamas, I would waddle downstairs and see that breakfast was not actually ready. I soon realized my father sent my brother on purpose a few minutes before breakfast was on the table because nobody was allowed to eat or do anything unless everyone was seated and said grace. Time was a construct and I took my sweet time going downstairs.

On a typical weekend morning from my bedroom, walls sea-foam green to give me the illusion I was on vacation instead of a teenage hell, I would smell salty applewood smoked bacon on the griddle, sweet plantains bubbling in the fryer, eggs I hated that were scorched from a warped and scraped up pan that I hated, white toast being slathered with butter, paired with the aroma of freshly peeled oranges on the table. I would come into the kitchen, standing over my mother's shoulder, conspiring to steal a slice of bacon and how eat my sister’s portion.

When breakfast was served and broken with grace, we passed platters around family style, serving ourselves subconsciously knowing how many slices of toast, waffles, bacon, and eggs each person gets. My father always got more. With the NBC’s Weekend Today as white noise, we talked about what we watched on TV or learned in school, or about the drama at work. There were times when we asked permission to hang out with friends and others when there was silence because we could never surpass small talk. I think that's why I don't mind small talk. It's nostalgic.

Since the divorce, I talk to no one. I wake up on the early weekends, begrudgingly from the noise of families walking by on their way to grab their morning coffee and sweets from my neighbor’s at the coffee shop downstairs. I brush my teeth and face, and depart to the kitchen in my pajamas. I break out 2 eggs from a half dozen cartons and pull a whole pack of bacon out of the fridge to eat half. I defrost last week's sourdough from Mel The Bakery and scrummage for fruit I forgot at the back of my fridge. There aren’t ripe plantains in my tiny town of 6,000 people. I listen to some tunes, but usually I cook in silence, listening to the tunes of bacon and eggs come to a crisp. I assemble my plate, and bring it down the hall to the dining room to sit down and eat at a table meant for 6.

Even in solitude, the echoes of my family’s old routines remain, like the way I turn on the TV just to fill the silence—just as my father did. But over time, new rituals have started to take shape, ones that don’t replace the past but layer onto it, creating something of my own.

My evenings have found their own rhythm, stitched together by small rituals of connection. Every evening, A, someone I call my chosen sister calls me. We talk about about everything and nothing at all. Our shared gripe with dinner, how each day wore us down, graced us with hope, or a dream that lingered from the night before. Some nights, I cook while we FaceTime, my phone propped up against jars of unlabeled spices, making me feel like a TV chef on the Food Network. She tunes in as I prepare my best meals—and the ones I make with hate.

Other nights we exist in silence, including her in my thoughts. In the the quiet of my kitchen, as I stand over my stove every night I realize that I’m no longer cooking to remember. I’m cooking to create something new.

To my sister and friend,

I love you.