Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

“It’s brave if you make it, foolish if you fail.”

TASTE, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.

“You’re only beginning to learn what you don’t know. First you must relearn your senses. Your senses are never inaccurate—it’s your ideas that can be false.”

“You,” she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. “I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse.” I didn’t say anything. That was in fact a very eloquent expression of what I wanted. “I’m giving you permission to take yourself seriously. To take the stuff of this world seriously. And to start having. That’s abundance.”

“You’re very affected by things. A gust of wind throws you. You take everything seriously.”

“Your eyes. It’s unmistakable,” he said. He thumbed my cheekbone. “Veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine.”

try not to have ideas about things, always aim for the thing itself.

Didn’t you run away to find a world worth falling in love with, saying you wouldn’t care if it loved you back?

I felt alone like I hadn’t since before I moved to the city, like I would never connect with another person for as long as I lived.

I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.