The Seven Year Slip

I didn’t even know what love was supposed to feel like

I haven’t? Okay, okay—picture it: long family-style tables. The walls are red. Everything is comfy, the leather on the chairs broken in. I’d get a local artist to design the chandeliers, hire all my favorite people, put your art on the walls,” he added with a wink. “It’ll be a place where you feel a bit at home, you know?”

He leaned over the table and pressed his lips to mine. Then we broke away—just for a moment, a sharp intake of breath—and crushed our mouths together again. I curled my fingers around the front of his dress shirt and tugged at his already loose tie. He cupped my face with his hands, and drank me in. I melted into him faster than ice cream on a hot sidewalk. He kissed like he wanted to savor me.

It is rarely the food that truly makes a meal, but the people we share it with. A family spaghetti recipe passed down from your grandma. The smell of dumplings clinging to a sweater you haven’t washed in years. A cardboard pizza across a yellow table. A friend, lost in a memory, but alive in the taste of a half-burnt brownie.
Love in a lemon pie.

The Emily Dickinson gave me the worst hangover.”

My aunt used to say, if you don’t fit in, fool everyone until you do

Because the things that mattered most never really left.

The love stays.

The love always stays, and so do we

La tristesse durera toujours.”

The sadness will last forever.

It wasn’t a lie. There was sadness, and there was despair, and there was pain—but there was also laughter, and joy, and relief. There was never grief without love or love without grief, and I chose to think that my aunt lived because of them

“If you do it right,” I repeated, “once is all you need.”

I didn’t find out who I wanted to be until I was almost forty. You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that. Once I found mine, I’ve been content for twenty years.”