Eric: How long have we been married?
Me: Three years and some months.
Eric: Dang! We’ve been married over three years?
Me: Yup.
Eric: Man! (Pauses to ponder.) What did we do the first year?
Me: I don’t know. I think we sat around in our studio apartment, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol.
Eric: ...
Me: ...
Eric: That was you?
The bedside lamp was still on, and Eric and I had been talking just moments before, when I yelped, “Uh oh!”
“What, Mooj?”
I realized I had been dreaming. “Huh...? Whoa, I was dreaming.”
“About what?”
“That there was a bookshelf behind you, and on the left middle shelf was an uneaten hamburger.”
“UH oh!”
“I know.”
Since the inception of my crazy work schedule, the thing I miss most is cooking with Eric. We used to make bizarre grocery lists, full of rare seasonal produce, exotic spices, and seemingly-frivolous cooking oils. Then, we’d enter the kitchen with the feeling that there was an exciting challenge ahead of us. In those days, we were making fragrant, delicious concoctions on an almost-daily basis -- so physically satisfying, and yet so emotionally satisfying because we were doing it together.
After too many weeks, or perhaps months, away from the kitchen together, the cookbooks came off the shelf tonight. We made the time to bake the most delicious, wintery pasta with a side of butternut squash and ginger purée. And when the meal was over, we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave the kitchen -- so we organized our Herbs-Spices-and-Frivolous-Oils Cupboard.
I truly haven’t felt so close to my husband in a long time. I didn’t realize that by missing out on cooking with him, I was missing out on much more.