it feels like trying to snatch tendrils of smoke
slipping through my fingers (baby's first lit mag acceptance!)
I wrote this a while back — a piece about a { lovely / sweet / fuzzy } evening the summer I was living in New York, attempting to grasp at what made it special, ephemerality itself, a love letter to some dear friends, a text-only polaroid. It just came out in Sine Theta Magazine (with very gracious edits by Laetitia Keok); here it is 🫶
tasting menu
W would be leaving earlier than they had initially planned, so they were having a celebratory goodbye dinner. In this whole summer this would be the first and last time they all ate together — W the artist, S the writer, D the engineer — despite having shared an apartment for months. There was a place with a Michelin star around the corner from their sublet, sandwiched between a bodega and a coffeeshop, and on W’s last night they made a reservation there. A two-minute walk, and they were somehow still late. W had forgotten to respond to the calendar invite. S’s work call ran overtime. D decided at the last minute to put on some makeup.
They joked about their various levels of burnout. We went to all this trouble to live together, yet barely see each other. We go home every day and go straight to our rooms. We’re too exhausted to even talk.
By the fourth course they were wine-drunk. They finished the fifth, a bread course — a sweet brown loaf with salted butter — and all agreed that it was one of the best things they had eaten in months. Every time a waiter passed by, they collapsed into giggles, too embarrassed to ask for more, fully realizing that the dinner must march on, that the sixth course would be coming out any second, and that by then it would be too late to return to the bread.
There’s a poem that describes how I feel right now, said W, cheeks flushed coral. It’s called “There is No Word.” It’s about the feeling of something escaping, something unnameable, something irreversible. Right now, this bread is escaping me.
D would have liked to suspend time, then.
Dessert was underwhelming, but was it the food itself — tiny melon balls in a cool, clear broth — or that there were no more courses to come? On their way out they passed the kitchen, racks and racks of bread and dough in various stages of proofing, cooking, cooling.
It was raining lightly, just coolly enough for it to be a relief. Why didn’t we do this earlier, we should have done this more, such a shame W is leaving now.
Back at the apartment D shut her door to call her partner. S shut her door to catch up on emails. It was her last night in the city, and W flicked off the living room light. She shut her door, too.
Thanks again to SINθ for giving this piece a home! They’re selling print copies here if you’d like to support the mag — and look what a beautiful cover.
