Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen

by Hannah Howard

Ari is storybook gorgeous. He’s going to be big someday, the heartthrob celebrity chef.

My peaches taste of the setting sun.

I still think Ari is gorgeous, a genius, but my heart has contracted. Loving him is a memory. I need a change. I want out of restaurantland. I can’t work with Ari anymore.

What is it with these older men?

“Your feelings won’t kill you,” Faith says as if reading my mind. “And they will pass. Promise.”

I know it’s the wrong thing to do, to love him, but I also know I have no choice.

I understand. He drinks the way I eat—to fill something unfillable.

His joy turns fast into a sort of brutal anger, and everything around him is suddenly all wrong, perverse, an enemy.

I panic. Who is this guy, and why am I here?

Joel reads my poems and has something to say, even about the worst ones.

“We’re supposed to be just-enough screwed up,” she says that night. “And that’s acceptable, even necessary. And then, when the screwed up takes over, everyone wonders what happened.” “I know,” I tell her. “The same thing happened to me.” It helps every time, this new knowledge that I am not alone with this.

“As we recover, we change. We learn to respect ourselves. We learn to live with integrity. I used to date the most awful men.”

“Trust me,” she says. “You are plenty lovable. The trick is finding the person you want to love back.”

I think maybe Nick could be a sane, sober person that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to bring to dinner with Ursula, to Passover. Anything seems possible.

The thought of a life with Nick is the thought of a roller coaster. I don’t even like roller coasters.

It’s working, going through the steps in the Big Book. I am changing. I rack up a year without starving myself, bingeing, without hurting myself with food, which seems a bona fide miracle.

Recovery rewires my brain, very slowly.

I know exactly who I am and what I’m doing. I’ve always known, I just didn’t trust myself. On good days, sometimes, I do.

What would my life be like if I believed I was beautiful? This seems like a stretch. So I try, What would my life be like if I believed I was okay?

I don’t use food as a drug.

I put life first.

But I am safe and loved and admired just as I am, no matter what size I wear, even if I have to tell myself this a million times over to half believe it.

I know I am ready for a different kind of love. I’ve been in a healing intensive.

I like to think of my heart like that. That each time it breaks, it gets more valuable and beautiful with the mending. It is a collage of gold.

Because at the end of the day,

I don't expect to see this tired phrase in a literary memoir.

The risotto comes out creamy and perfect. I serve myself a spoonful, neither gigantic nor tiny.

Somberg for believing in Feast, and

Anthony Mulira, I love you always and with all of me.