Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Food
I want to cook for more people, apparently. I can’t seem to prepare food just for two; I come up with three, four servings. I think about converting the library to a bedroom (which is what it’s supposed to be). Get a roommate. Someone who appreciates my food.
This afternoon, I showed Jake how to make crock pot beef stew, and also Marcella Hazan’s meatballs recipe. Some of the meat, we set aside as hamburger patties. Dinner for the next two days! That meatball recipe is pretty awesome if you use equal parts ground turkey and mild Italian sausage.
Today is a good day, inasmuch as nothing horrible happened. Yesterday was a comically bad day. Felt like Karen was stage-managing things from beyond the grave to give me a last few kicks to the gut. Trying to get back to normal? That’ll show you. But she overdid it. She went too far. I just started laughing after a while because it was all I could do.
I feel like I’m a visitor in an alternate universe. I’m an actor here. This isn’t my life. I’ll wear one of Karen’s shirts and think, “Oh, she’s not gonna like it if I stretch this out,” but then I’ll remember that in this universe, she’s not here to complain. I can fuck up all of her shirts now. This sort of thing happens a lot.
No bad dreams. Jake gets the bad dreams. I only get glimpses, if I see her at all. She’s waiting for something and I don’t know what. Only once . . . I woke up in the dream and I had been sleeping in a different bed because I have a cold (in real life, too). So I was in one bed, Karen was in the next bed over. Like the Brady Bunch, got it? Back when, thanks to the censors, even married couples weren’t supposed to be sleeping in the same bed (let alone having sex!) Anyway. I went over to her bed, we started making out — it was like college again. And it was one of those dreams where I was blissfully ignorant of this world. I woke up before it got interesting. Wasn’t even sad when I woke up.
So she’s waiting. She’s waiting for the big talk, the big sit-down. Or maybe, this last year, we talked our hearts out so much that there’s no talking left to do. But I doubt that.
I don’t know what she’s waiting for. I’m ready.
D.
