“Feed me.” This was the only request you voiced during our mandated marriage counseling. I can’t remember what we cooked the first year we were married. But now I have Google Sheets on Google Sheets. Archives of weekly meal plans from the years since 2020.

Before we fell in love, I ate like trash.

Back then, I subsisted primarily on free food from the break room at work. Keeping you happy changed all of that.

You require three square meals a day—or else you get low blood sugar. Every morning you have bananas and yogurt for breakfast. When we go out for long hikes, you take a Lara bar in your pocket. In your mind, heavy hors d’oeuvres at a party doesn’t count as dinner. You are only satisfied with large portions. It’s always easy to convince you to look at the dessert menu, and it never seems to affect your figure.

For the first time since we’ve been married, you’re traveling away for work and leaving me home alone.

How will I eat for a whole week without your appetite to care for?

Saturday

After you walk out the door, I heat up the rest of the red pepper tomato soup from a carton in the fridge. I’m dunking a grilled cheese into the soup with one hand, my cell phone in the other, when I see the first video on social media. They executed a man in the street.

When you left, I sent you out of the house with as many Rice Krispie treats as could fit flat into a one gallon ziplock bag. Later I’ll eat the rest of them straight from the pan, mindlessly, as I watch the murder again from three additional angles.

In the afternoon, I smash a small avocado with a heap of salsa and eat tortilla chips from an open bag while I paint at the kitchen table.

It gets dark outside. I thaw a piece of fish from the back of the freezer. Dredge it in flour and lemon pepper, blacken it in butter with fresh thyme. It was flaky but still cold in the center when I plated it with potatoes.

After dinner I make chocolate chip muffins with the leftover Bisquick we bought to make sausage balls on Christmas morning. While they bake in the oven, I put on If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. The muffins turn out terrible. They taste metallic and sour.

Sunday

On Sunday morning, I accidentally pour cold water over the coffee in the Chemex filter. Apparently, I forgot to hit the button on the kettle. I brew another cup but it’s not as good as when you make it.

An hour later I fix two slices of toad-in-a-hole in the big non-stick pan while I have you on speakerphone. I’m telling you about the frozen limb that fell on our house during the ice storm this morning.

“It wasn’t that big. Not as big as the one that landed on your car. The gutter is barely dented!” I promise to send you pictures, as I drizzle maple syrup and Crystal hot sauce on top of my toast.

At noon, I endeavor to make a trout dip. First I blitz the remaining half of an open block of Philadelphia cream cheese in the food processor with Daisy, Duke’s, garlic, dijon and Worcestershire sauce. I mix this together with one tin of Fishwife Smoked Rainbow Trout. The old Food & Wine recipe I had saved on Pinterest redirects to a different page now, but I remember the best part being a sherry vinaigrette with shallots and capers to spoon over the top. I eat this with sourdough crackers from the health food store.

At 4 o’clock I bake cheese grits. I ladle the grits in a bowl, browned skin folding up on itself. For nutritional reasons, I add a handful of crispy kale.

At 9 o’clock I wash grapes to eat in front of the TV. Tonight’s pick is People We Meet on Vacation on Netflix. A misnomer.

Monday

Oatmeal with pecans and frozen blueberries.

The rest of the trout dip with crackers, followed by a slice of cinnamon-sugar toast using the heel at the end of the bag of sandwich bread.

I struggle to open a bottle of Red Rock ginger ale and I miss your strong man hands.

At 4:20 I have 8 vanilla wafers slathered with peanut butter, stacked into sandwiches like they serve the toddlers at church pre-school.

For dinner I make tacos with refried beans, shredded cabbage, cheese, salsa and sour cream. I throw out the avocado because it’s bad inside.

Tuesday

Grits and greens again.

Grapes.

Peanut-gochujang noodles with cabbage and scallions.

Surprise impromptu plans for dinner! I get invited to meet a girlfriend at our favorite Mexican restaurant. My order is a veggie burrito, chips, salsa, guac, cheese dip with jalapeños and a Coke. Heaven.

Wednesday

On my walk home from a dentist appointment, I stop and grab a dozen eggs and two croissants from the new grocery cafe that opened where the old Italian restaurant used to be. The croissant is almost as large as the ones from the French bakery but it’s more doughy than flaky, like a gigantic Pillsbury crescent roll.

Lunch is quesadillas.

For dinner I make a single piece of salmon, a pot of saffron couscous and a salad with fennel, celery, Honeycrisp apple and poppyseed dressing.

While I’m slicing the apple on the mandoline, I think to myself, “Don’t cut your fingers off like Chrissy Teigen. There’s nobody here to take you to the hospital.”

At 9:30 PM, I have two peanut m&ms as I sit down to watch Colbert.

Thursday

On Thursday morning, I open the pastry box to grab that second croissant and instantly recoil because there is a cockroach the size of a baby dinosaur nestled in the paper. Delicately, I grab the entire box and throw it in the trash but the antennae are twitching and the thing is moving and I’m not sure whether the bug is in the bin or escaped somewhere else in the kitchen.

Part of me wants to burn the house down and part of me wants to run out for breakfast but my hair is wet and I’m already $28 over my dining budget for the month with three days left, so I do the more sensible thing:

I scrub everything down, re-organize the pantry items on the counter and prepare a serving of oatmeal.

Just as the water starts to boil, I see the f*cker out of the corner of my eye. That same cockroach, who never made it into the trashcan, is army-crawling slowly on the edge of the backsplash toward my bread box.

Oh hell no. I take off one of my sherpa-lined Boston clogs, wielding it in my hand like death. With careful aim, I hammer down on the bug. A direct hit but it’s only stunned. Wounded but not dead, it beelines across the counter and dips down behind the safety of the oven.

Husband, if you were here, you would have killed it. You wouldn’t have let it get away.

When you are here, we call all cockroaches “Marty” like Julia Garner talking down to Jason Bateman on Ozark. When you are here, you yell out “Aghck!” like a battle cry while you smash the bastards with your sneakers. You always announce yourself victorious.

❧

When I leave to walk to yoga, I notice there are three, smooth black rocks the size of crabapples arranged in a triangle on the ground at the end of our walkway.

Who put them there?

For some reason my thoughts go immediately to our neighbor up the street who lives with a chronic disconnection from reality. Sometimes I encounter her out and about, pacing around. She wears headphones and talks to herself. She’s in her own world.

Maybe it’s coincidence but her manic activity seems to correspond with an increase of unexpected street debris in the form of abandoned articles of clothing. One time I found a maroon cotton tank top hanging from our mailbox. Yesterday, I found a pastel cashmere glove attached to the top of a stick, impaled on a bush like the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies.

Did some friendly neighbor find a lost glove and prop it up so its owner might recover it? Was that blue hoodie in the front lawn of the old Glover cottage left by a landscape worker? Why do I imagine these clothes and rocks are part of some connected pattern?

Gifts from spirits in another realm.

❧

The basic yoga class on Thursday is an exercise in mental fortitude. The big room is crowded and balmy. I feel angry because the linen curtains in the front window are still hanging askew. They’ve been maliciously neglected, off their tracks for over a year now at this point. I wonder if there’s a step-stool in the studio’s utility closet. I fantasize about buying the entire yoga studio so I can fix the curtains in the window.

Today’s yoga instructor is a history teacher who loves to talk about her kids. She has golden curly hair, a sing-songy voice and a tendency to laugh at her own jokes. Her playlist is all her “happy music” but to me it’s a mild form of torture. Opalite by Taylor Swift is followed by Michael Franti’s The Sound of Sunshine, and Michael Franti makes me think about the flash mob on the hit Showtime series Weeds with Mary-Louise Parker.

While I’m on the mat, moving between warrior two and star pose, I think about how there’s a general strike happening tomorrow. I don’t want to let clients down by refusing to work but I could choose not to shop. What if you decide to come home early from your trip? What would I cook you for dinner? Should I order an Instacart today so I’m not shopping tomorrow?

Eventually I’m laying like a pancake in savasana and the playlist switches to Donna Lewis.

Feels like I’m standing in a timeless dream
Of light mists, of pale amber rose

Suddenly I hear myself bock like a chicken, a short outburst of laughter. The teacher quickly switches her playlist to the next song but it’s too late. The earworm is already stuck in my head:

I love you, always forever
Near and far, closer together
Everywhere I will be with you
Everything I will do for you

❧

INT. HOME - AFTERNOON

Sourdough toast with sardine butter, aleppo pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

The rest of the apple-fennel salad right out of the mixing bowl with a fork.

A handful of Nilla wafers.

A chunk of aged gouda.

Crackers.

Mixed nuts.

Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz ice cream with four new episodes of Bridgerton.

Friday

After my late night Bridgerton binge fest, I wake up late, feed the dog, take a shower, and get beans brewing. When I finally pick up my phone, I realize I’m supposed to be in East Atlanta for a coffee date with a friend in 15 minutes. It’s an hour away in traffic.

My incredibly gracious friend agrees to wait for me. I dump my coffee into a travel mug and jump in a Lyft.

Raani Coffee Roasters is bright and alive. I order a cup of drip for my friend and two items from the pastry case for myself: a golden masala spiced biscuit and a cardamom-scented bun. “Something sweet, something savory.”

Ugh I’m not doing a good job at general striking today but also: this is an immigrant-owned, woman-owned small business! And this masala biscuit is delicious. I peel away the soft layers from the crispy square bottom while we talk about life, husbands, houses, kittens, careers and navigating this busted-ass tech job market.

Back at home I take a mystery Pyrex of soup out of the freezer. I run hot water over the bottom until the block of soup comes free. Then I pop it in a pot to heat up on the stove. “Nice!” White beans and potatoes with leeks and carrots. “Good job, past Melanie.”

You text me to say you’re coming home early:

Yay! What do you want for dinner?

No dinner. It’ll be really late.

Then:

Leaving soon, home around 8

At 4:45 I leave the house to walk to hot yoga and I see the rock formation at the end of the walkway is gone. Snatched up. Vanished.

When I get home, I put together a lemon-poppyseed loaf because as Cher Horowitz taught me in 1995, “Whenever a boy comes, you should always have something baking.”

Finally! You walk through the front door. I kiss your face. The dog is ecstatic. You are starving.

“You didn’t eat dinner?”

“No, I didn’t know what the plan was. Barely had any fruit or vegetables all week.”

“This is what happens when grown men manage an itinerary…”

Lost boys.

Effortlessly, like kissing locks, we click back into place.

Chinese takeout from Wei is on the way.

Tomorrow you’ll make coffee. Tomorrow there will be snow.