Baked eggs [Stay]

"The truth is this:

My love for you is the only empire

I will ever build.

When it falls,

as all empires do,

my career in empire building will be over."

- Mindy Nettifee, “This is the Nonsense of Love”

4 eggs

green onions

red onions
3 table spoons of oil

salt
pepper
paprika
minced garlic
bell peppers


i miss you most when i'm making baked eggs on a perfectly sunny saturday morning while swinging back beer and dancing around my kitchen to Taylor Swift. It hits me in between dicing the onions and convincing myself to use less oil that you are not mine anymore. That i have lost and shed all the skin that you once touched and bore your tongue into. that life has moved on without you. i am not sad anymore. i am not depressed anymore. but the poems all lie. missing someone hits you in between the most mundane tasks.  it happens when you're hands deep in eggs and suddenly the beating eggs sound like the way your heart shivered and stopped the first time he dared reach for you.
I don't know why you left. you found my scars beautiful, worth exploring, you found the possibilities of me endless and then you didn't. isn't that how all love stories end?

cut your green onions, bell peppers, red onions
pour your oil in to your sauce pan
put in your cut red onions when oil is hot, let it fry till translucent
put in tons of minced garlic, bell peppers and green onions, and let it fry for a bit
put in all the spices you're comfortable with (salt, stock cubes, paprika, all spice,ginger powder)
let it simmer for a little bit, then take it off the fire.

i don't know why you came back but at dinner i couldn't stop watching your mouth, the way it broke into nervous laughter, and the way it said my name like it belonged there, tucked in between the pearly gates of your tongue. you reached for me in a barely furnished apartment with your breath tinged with the beer you had been downing all night and you tasted like pain. Body shamed and caving with such desperation, kisses dropping upon the small towns and cities of this map of a body that you've colonised and left, time and time again.
is there a word for the crumbling of a body into submission? is there a word for the colour of red on dark skin? is there a word for two souls disappearing into each other? for 9 months worth of longing taken out on bodies too weak and yet too eager to love? is there a word for being too young to make your body into a mantra for passion?
on days like this, it looks like love. while our bodies are tangled and gasping for air, our hearts turn down the volumes of all the things we've done wrong, of all the ways this is a disaster, of all the ways we will eventually destroy each other. i am not a safe pick, someone should have told you that, i have been patched on and fixed, callouses and bones and flesh and little heart and i am guaranteed to come undone.

preheat your oven to 400 degrees
pour your vegetables into a baking pan you already coated with butter or a non stick spray
beat your eggs
pour your eggs over your vegetables
let it bake till the eggs are done.
sprinkle a little parsley or basil on top
enjoy

what i know of losing yourself in someone is this-
you will learn to enjoy the pain-
he doesn't mean to make you cry, he was just never taught how to stay
you will not recognise you in the mirror anymore
you will learn to peel off the sadness on days it surfaces unexpectedly
you will look up 9 months later while baking eggs and miss them
and suddenly, you won't know what to do with your hands.

love,
leggy