I still buy too much.
The hand reaches for two because two is what the hand learned. The hand learned two at the beginning and added more as the years added more and now the subtracting is proving harder than the adding was, because the adding happened slowly over time and the subtracting happened all at once, in August, in a parking lot, in a hug that lasted a little longer than the ordinary hugs.
I halve the recipes and the recipes do not always cooperate.
Half a can of tomatoes. Half a cup of rice. The arithmetic of a smaller life, and I know that is not the right word for it, smaller is not the right word, the life is not smaller it is different, it is a different shape, but standing in the kitchen at six o’clock on a Wednesday measuring half a cup of rice, smaller is the word that comes.
I eat at the counter sometimes.
I do not set the table when it is just me. The table still exists. It is there. We ate at that table every night for years, we fought at it and laughed at it and did homework on it and had the conversations you have nowhere else, the conversations that happen because you are in the same room and the food is in front of you and the ordinary evening has given you permission to say the true things. I ate at that table three times a day for sixteen years of being someone’s mother in the full-time daily sense. I do not know how to eat there alone. The table knows too much about the other version.
I am not complaining. I want to be clear that I am not complaining.
I am just saying that nobody told me the grief would live in the kitchen. In the half-cups and the single place setting and the leftovers that go bad because I forgot I was only cooking for one. In the tomatoes. In the rice.
I am learning. I buy less now. I set the table when I feel like it and eat at the counter when I don’t and I am trying to understand that both of those things are allowed, that choosing what you need is not the same as being lost, that cooking for one is just cooking, that the one it is for deserves a good meal.
