Everywhere I go in this city there are advertisements and billboards for apps that deliver food to you. What is private and vaguely shameful, delightful in its shamefulness - hot wings or sushi in bed on a Monday - is now corporate territory. Exposed, publicly acknowledged as a socially acceptable lifestyle. I am not alone with my body and my food balanced on my body, sometimes dripping onto my body. Now I’m out in the world walking down the street, fantasizing about receiving lukewarm and ultimately disappointing takeout from a man I will never see again. 

I was on a date the other day and it had to be a secret. Because of those who I orbit, those who orbit me, those who orbit this other person. He arrived at my front gate in a jacket hanging off his shoulders just so. I shouted out my bedroom window. Already we were inhabiting filmic roles, reproducing massmedia romance. We were looking for somewhere to eat and made a silent pact that we would walk until we found somewhere that struck us. This implied that we would be struck by the same thing, which knowing very little about each other, was of course a gamble. I was trying not to think too much about it ahead of time. We stopped in front of an Italian restaurant and knew we had to go in because the longer it took us to choose a restaurant the more strained the essence of the romance would feel. Feigned spontaneity felt important. The restaurant was the kind of constructed cultural image you could almost forget was real because you’d seen its uncanny cousin in so many images. This is to say, when you act out a cliché (italian restaurant, white table cloth, booth by the window) you can hardly enjoy the moment itself for being so self aware. There is the impulse to coat everything in irony. I say “this is hilarious, this is such a ‘date.’” He picks up on my air-quotes, but thinks am mocking the concept of us on a date, when what I am trying to do is gesture to the aesthetics of the “date” that we are so clearly engaging in, and how that is kind of embarrassing, but also I want to acknowledge this and find it funny together. It doesn’t land. He chooses what he wants so quickly I find it offputting - bowtie pasta with cooked salmon and a seltzer. I want wine, but to drink alone on a date, that is not a pleasure I will engage in. I cannot get over the scenery. Crossing my legs, crossing my ankles, crossing my arms, folding my hair over my ears, and undoing it all, over and over. Miming the shadowy outlines of aphrodisiac. Days later I scrape the congealed leftovers of my pasta from its styrofoam container and eat it for lunch. 

I don’t even like smoking but something to put your mouth around is always a good prop. So is fishing a hand in a briney jar of something pickled. Propensity for stimulation. Just the right kind of salty and atrocious. Wrist deep in the kitchen.

The person I had been in a relationship with for three years looked to me while lying in bed, months after our uncoupling, so uncorked in the summertime aftermath of it all. With those globular eyes, in an attempt at recovering intimacy, as if stoking a secret, he said, “does your mother… still make salads?”

When I was in school there was a girl in my class who could eat anything and make the food neutralized of embarrassment - clementines, bahn mi, an entire falafel plate smelling abruptly of garlic, carrots and dip. To eat in public without embarrassment or even the thought of embarrassment is enviable to me. Her body - or not her body, but the projection of self that her body represented in physical form - alchemically shifting anything she touched to have the tilt of her, an iridescent coolness, red clogs, the right thing to be doing. 

In the fall I was at a man’s house. He’d carefully constructed a strawberry tart for us to demolish that evening. It was really a beautiful creation. He had fabricated this desert for us to eat while stoned, and this was his prowess. I walked forty minutes to his apartment. Notoriously, if only to myself, I am bad with a bong - like with all things I tend to double take, suck once more than I should, hold on too long. The strawberry tart was as good as it looked and we ate it off blue plates on his front stoop. He knows what good poetry is. If he were writing this it would be so much more of an abstraction, third tier of floating backwards away from the event itself. The strawberry alone is very concrete, he might be known for his affinity to strawberry in certain communities, and that in itself is impressive, such commitment. He might be known for too for the smoothness with which after sexual rejection, after anointing proposed random sex with a desire for intimacy and friendship, or something, he says could I lay my head on your lap? As friends? And of course there is the tart and there is the double take so of course he can and he did.

While I was stealing t-shirts from value village I was listening to a podcast interview with a poet that says some days she’d like to just date a bus boy and be normal. My friend who stole a silver candelabra from value village because of their supposedly corrupt moral operations encouraged me to try stealing it as an exercise in grit. That’s just one reason to do it. I conflate the image of the bus boy and being normal with theft and silver. I conflate it with my own projections of the bus boy coming home to the poet after a particularly long shift, slightly aching and smelling of smoked fish and potato grease. A bus boy scrapes and cleans leftover food scraps from dishware like licking skin. The more you do it the less pleasurable the action becomes and eventually it loses any sense of aesthetic romance or sensory romance and is merely mechanical, the action itself needing to be completed. Something like spaghetti sauce might be easier to clean off and something like pesto might be more difficult. Years ago my friend left period blood soaked all over the sheets of the person she loved before he broke her heart. I’m convinced he still loves her and always will because for weeks after their uncoupling, anytime someone would visit his room and see his sheets, he would say that he’d spilled spaghetti in bed.