We’ve begun spending so much time sitting in a proximate way, loving each other quietly.  Five years of space on the books somehow wrote us next to each other on the page and we are happy to be there.  We have woven ourselves an autumn cocoon, but a blooming one that heats and stimulates, but also opens and closes and transmutates.

                A lung in breath.

                We are a cocoon because we feast behind these doors, swinging more often than not.  Each days belongs to each one of us alone, name-coded and concerned with whatever importance boils (and why are bills always doing the simmering?).  But then it is five, rolling in lazy and duskier by the day, thankfully naked of neither strike nor chime.  Then is it five and we say, “what’s for dinner?”

                No.  We say, “I’m cooking tonight.  It’ll be ready in an hour.”

                Two hours later we are still chopping, crying over onions and rooting around the refrigerator’s bottom drawer for root vegetables or cheese.  The mist of scent and rising heat forms wavering layers that press upward toward the warm glow of the ceiling, but still drooping and shifting into our famished noses, our watering mouths.  Someone has gone to the store for more wine, two empty bottles already huddled together in the green recycle bin, their warmth settling comfortably into our stomachs.  The clerk at the liquor market two blocks away still makes jokes.

                “Two wasn’t enough?”  with a cool friendly laugh.  He must have guessed we were all related.  My father’s nose, my mother’s giggle.

                We bring gifts, shaped like the humans closest to us at the time these plans are made.

                Today, it is Alex.  Alex, who we’ve heard spoken of often enough that a handshake surprises us, his corporeality startling, and he’s not made of words?

                He is, actually, full of them, as most bodies are who come into our kitchen.  In a drawer, alongside two mechanisms to pop and twist corks and more types of forks than we’ve ever used, there is some soft thing, metal and plastic and wood.  It fits only in the  mouths of guests, forgettable and airy as gauze, and it tugs out words like infection from a wound.

                Doesn’t it feel better on the outside?  See, that now we can trace its shape?

                Alex, I’m sure, would allow his words a meeting with open air exclusive of the tools of an easy going family with Malbec-stained teeth.  He asks questions that perk our ears like a dog who’s heard the whoosh of an opening refrigerator.  We want to sound intelligent around him: for what feels like the first time in so many months, we’re nervous for someone to like us.  In hindsight, I recognize such earnestness as being partially the product of novelty.  So often our companions have joined our litter years ago.  With Alex, it’s as though we want to make sure that it’s still worth joining. 

                We want him to like us, and he easily does.  He is full of appreciation and charm and cooking techniques.  He prefers to use a meat cleaver to chop garlic and he still looks everyone straight in the eye while they talk, his hands manipulating food with ease.  His interest doesn’t beg a blush, but rather wants you to stand next to him and say: “here!  Look what I’ve done.  Be proud of me!”

                He is at the island counter now, stirring and rolling out fresh dough for homemade noodles, a dusting of white perched on the underside of his left arm.  He uses slow careful strokes that reflect the way he carefully explores the curves and angles of the beings around him.  He wants no ostentatious stretching, no false, forced bumps.  He’d like for you, and his dough to fall, or be so lightly prodded, into the beauty of natural imperfections.  He lifts and presses the old wooden pin of our grandmother’s with such care that I’m moved by how fatherly he treats eggs and flour.

                As that tartness of tomatoes peaks into its final simmer, and we walk around the round table carrying multicolored plates and clinking water glasses, we have all become more quiet than usual.  Perhaps he has calmed us, though it seems we are all making plans: writing everything down and buying tents and calling aunts on the phone and pointing to the drawer where our father keeps his maps.  We are breathing and feeling our stomachs expand with cooling September air, but we are expecting our next breath.  We are living in every kind of moment.  We should.

                And then the food is ready, so then we sit down around a table and thank the earth.  And then, we feast.