A Love Story, As Understood Through Gustation

His gaze spreads me like apricot preserves on restaurant depot crepes, a dozen cracked eggs on cold pavement, albumen reaching in frantic desperate towards albumen, lonely yolks swimming in a sea of white. Milky evenings near the summer equinox, avoiding the bag of cherries because it is our first date and I’m scared to spit the pit with him looking, and so I say, “no,” when he says, “Aren’t you hungry?”

His gaze, across the cramped table of a tiny restaurant where we pay for our meal with a Visa. We blush like children when we hand it to the waitress, both brimming with lemon semifreddo and rosé and late spring air.

His gaze two feet from my face, a rupture in my stomach because I didn’t eat anything and he doesn’t kiss me but he says, “When can I see you again?” and that feels like enough.

His gaze felt to me like this duck we would make years later on a New Years Eve in Montreal. It had the crispest skin and was incinerator red and we ate it slowly and deliberately, both a little drunk on crappy supermarket wine. The taste of subzero temperatures and arugula between our molars.

His gaze on the Montreal subway at midnight. Our first new years together and we didn’t plan ahead. His gaze so that the septically orange subway falls away from the moment like flour from a mill, fat delicate puffs touching down on wet ground. The people in the train car evaporate like layers of a stock and when he kisses me, it tastes corporeal and expansive, transformative and dreamy, vaguely like a punch and distinctly like home.

-NG