000: HOME

Location: West End, Providence. Hours: At the Chef's convenience. Date of Visit: 8/3/2024

This is Home.

This is the first apartment you could term yours, and yours alone. It's designed as an upscale shoebox, a single open room you've used the strategic placement of carpets and furniture to delineate the kitchen from the office from the living room, all arrayed in one direct line. 

The kitchen is your favorite part, you've built an island out of one you bought for this apartment and one IKEA cart you've hauled from every apartment you've lived in since you were 23, which you once sanded and lacquered yourself. You have brought all the classics you learned to cook then, along with the new ones you've taught yourself here. You improved your mother's tortellini soup here, supplementing some of the ingredients on the internet. You've made your grandmother's biscoitos, unchanged. You learned to roll maki here, you have experimented with oshizushi (box sushi), and you've attempted nigiri, although you can never get the ratio or shape of the rice or slicing the fish quite right. You've started to create the culinary world you've watched for years on YouTube here. You have a master stock that sits in your freezer, being cooked once or twice a month, a "perpetual stew" as it's called, hearkening back to medieval kitchens, where a pot would simmer day in and day out over a fire that never went out, ready to braise whatever meat or vegetable strikes your fancy (cubed pork shoulder has caught your fancy, for the most part). You've bought dried chilis and made red chili sauce, which you freeze into one-cup cubes, ready to be turned into something else, like a mole or enchiladas or chili colorado. You experiment with adding red lentils to stretch a ragu and have extras to freeze like the chili sauce. You steam lotus bao buns, with you serve with your homemade breakfast sausage from pork and venison and fennel seeds and orange zest. You save your chicken scraps, throw half in the Instant Pot and half in the dutch oven, with water and vegetables that are almost ready to turn, and make yourself far too much stock, which becomes the base for anything else you make. You buy the spices you need to make curries, the gochujang and mushrooms and rice vermicelli you need to make Korean chicken bakes. 

The whole world is ready to sit in your kitchen, ready to be devoured at your table, though the only one you have is a coffee table which you've bought in the largest size you could, with cushions so that guests can sit on the floor in relative comfort. 

You watched this building rise, two stories taller than any of its neighbors, a sepulchral box of steel slowly skinned, when you lived in this neighborhood, on the other side of the park, with the woman you got engaged to, Ophelia. That didn't come to pass, or else you wouldn't be living here, you'd be in the house in Riverside you hated, with its lack of sidewalks or places to walk to. When you sold that house the two of you had bought during the pandemic, you bought yourself a number of Japanese kitchen knifes, including the single-beveled usuba, for making careful curved cuts, that with a practice hand, can spiral cut a cucumber or daikon into a single paper thin strip longer than your arm, like the most sensitive mandoline ever made. You bought the yanagiba, also single-bevel, the "willow-leaf blade" for slicing through fish to create the perfect sashimi cut. You had planed to practice that paper cut, planned to practice with the gentle turn of the willow-leaf needed to create a cupping for the fish to sit just so on top of the rice bed that makes a perfectly marbled nigiri.

It is harder to make sushi with them now, and you rarely you do, though you used to make it all by yourself for yourself alone. You've lived here for about a year and a half, and you've had your heart broken so many times here, at least four by your count. You fell in love with Viola making sushi on your second date, a date that stretched from one night to three days, and two weeks later she passed you a card across the table that said she felt as you'd known each other for eight years. Four months later, the relationship was over when she realized that you were depressed and not doing anything about it. That except for your first date, a picnic in the park near the empty I-195 land, she'd never seen you without a drink. You drank every day, a glass of bourbon or two. But you've been drunk less than times than you have fingers, so that was okay, you told yourself. She heard the rattle of ice cubes in the glass the same way someone might hear a guard dragging a club along the bars of a cage. Only you were warden, guard, and prisoner. Viola brought you fish from Narragansett every Friday, and you rolled maki together, side by side, in your kitchen. You always made enough to have equal amounts, but she would save you one last slice of the salmon, avocado and mango--because she knew it was your favorite.

Maybe you'll find someone else worth making sushi for again someday. You can't let one person own the joy it gave you, but right now you have to admit it's poisoned by the memory. You tried it once a few months ago, with another woman you met off the apps, just like her, who suggested that you make it, that she wanted to see these special knives you'd talked about. But you couldn't get salmon or tuna within walking distance: Fearless Fish fled West Fountain for the Hope Street, and Urban Greens Co-op's selection shifts more often than the wind. You settled for shrimp, which you cooked from frozen. But sitting there, across your oversized coffee table from her, and it was the Talking Heads: this is not your beautiful house, this is not your beautiful wife. You didn't realize it was happening, until you were sitting with the feeling later, but your date realized something was wrong and that it wasn't just the fish, and she left, an hour into it. You can't fault her for it.

You got a shot at getting better here. For the first time in a longest time, you woke up one day and felt at peace with yourself. Happy even. You quit drinking. The bar you'd stocked up, spending $500 on alcohol in a single spree after the house sold, is removed, replaced with a shrine to coffee, which is what you'd bought those shelves for in the first place. You quit video games and television. You learn to knit. You write, you try to write every day. By March you've written 1,200 words a day on average. By July you're down at 995, but maybe you'll bring it back up if you continue. You leave the house, you socialize, you make new friends. The happiness doesn't last as long as you hoped it would, but this is it, perhaps, this is the constant gardening, the long patrol, that you'll be working on for the rest of your life. When you check in with your psychiatrist about increasing your meds, she observes that if you're still pushing yourself out every week, if you'll spend a day with strangers out in an ocean bay, learning to sea kayak, you may not be as depressed as you think you are.

However happy you might get, you're not happy here. This isn't a home. What kind of home is a place where your heart gets robbed? Your new neighbors suck. You've looked at the floor plan, and in every other apartment in the building, the bedrooms are either arranged so they share a wall with the neighboring apartment's bedroom, or they are against an exterior wall. Not yours. Yours is against their living room, the one with the TV on it. When you bang on the door at 2am on a Thursday, their bass beats rattling the wall, you hear someone on the other side inform the others, "it's an old person." You're 35. It'll happen to you soon enough, kid, you think.

After she left, the repairs they were doing on the penthouses three floors up resulted in water coming out of the window recess in your bedroom. The apartment falls apart with your heart, and you have to hound the super and talk about mold to get it solved. A proper home isn't going to include a request that you use cheap 3M hooks to hang your art. You ignore it. If they don't want this to be a nails-in-the-wall apartment, they can knock $100 off your monthly rent. 

The irony of this is that you almost wept at your cubicle of the job you were working when you got this apartment. It was a relief, after the collapse of your engagement. You finally had a space all your own to move on in. And you did, though it's caused you pain since, and you  suspect will cause you pain again.

You got your dog back here. You knew your ex-fiancée very well. When people asked what you were doing with the dog, you told them that you'd trade off the 70lb German Shepherd mutt every other month, but that you were pretty sure she'd ask you to take Saga full-time. They gave you sad, piteous glances, and made small, sympathetic noises, as if to say, "you've only really kicked that can down the road, you know." Three months after you move in, Ophelia asks if she can speak to you and tearfully confesses that she can't keep up with Saga herself. She is embarrassed, she thinks you'll be angry, but you aren't. You didn't want to saddle her with the dog, you explain. You just didn't want to fight Ophelia for her. Saga sleeps in your bed now, on the side Viola used to sleep, which is the side of the bed you used to sleep on when you were with with Ophelia. But it was never the side of the bed you wanted to sleep on.

Saga will break your heart too, you know, but at least you knew that going in. Her muzzle's turned so white in the five years you've had her, and sometimes she has trouble making the jump from floor to bed and down again. You think you'll need to buy her stairs at some point in the near future. They tell you that eight is old for a large dog. The vet's office starts sending you marketing emails for things to keep in mind when caring for your "senior" dog. You don't want her to die here. Let her die in a place with a fenced-in backyard, where you'll grow a proper herb and vegetable garden, rather than the collection of pots and cut-up plastic gallon jugs that wilt and shrivel too quickly, and she can dig herself a shallow indent to lie in, under some brush, never the same one, always fresh, which you'll have to fill in and reseed. She deserves that, for all the joy and love she's given you and has yet to give you.

This, you know, is not a home. It is simply the place you are living in right now.

This is Home.