Today I’m feeling kind of shitty. I think I have another UTI, or maybe it’s just a relapse of the first one, which I ignored, at least in the “you’re not supposed to have insane athletic sex while you’re getting over one” department. Also my annoyingly chipper British roommate (“What’s the matter then, ducky? Are you feeling sad? I’m making some proper biscuits!” [never mind that it's 500 degrees out and this apartment traps heat like an oven even when the actual oven isn't on]” seems to have given me her cold. I’ve been doggedly fighting it all off with tons of fluids and acidophilus and kombucha and fresh fruit and vegetables. Also, today I made the best chicken soup I’ve ever made. The recipe follows.

(Currently, though, I’m fighting off my various diseases by sitting here typing at 4:52 am, filled with kombucha, Vicodin, manic energy and impotent rage, listening to a playlist I just made entitled ‘Love Stinks.’ The explanation for that follows as well.)

Heartbreak Soup [Chicken Variety]

You will need:

1 nice organic free range bird

a head of garlic

a big knob of fresh ginger

a bunch of leeks

two carrots

two parsips or parsley roots

sea salt or kosher salt

pepper

good olive oil

(optional next-day additions: soba noodles, scallions).

Take the bag containing neck and giblets out of the chicken and boil up its contents to feed to your roommates’ cats. Feel virtuous for being like the Native Americans and using every part of the buffalo, also for not being such an exvegetarian pussy about touching a chicken esophagus as you used to be.

Hack the chicken into quarters. Kitchen shears come in handy. Pat ‘em dry and rub kosher or sea salt into them.

Smash and peel all the garlic cloves. Man is that a lot of garlic. Good. Peel the ginger and roughly chop.

Wash the leeks really, really well. I usually wash them once before slicing lengthwise and then chopping crosswise, and then I put the little leek half-coins in a bowl of cold water which I then drain two or three times. Make sure to do this, especially if your leeks are organic. Nobody wants dirt in their soup. Peel the carrots and parsnips/parsley roots and chop them into coins too. Set the leek/carrot/parsnip mixture aside in a bowl.

Take your biggest heaviest stockpot and pour enough good olive oil into the bottom to cover it and then some. Maybe you want it to rise an 1/8th inch up the sides. Heat it up to medium-high and then add the ginger and garlic cloves, reserving three or four cloves. When that’s sizzling and fragrant, arrange your chicken quarters around the inside of the stockpot, skin side down. Don’t fuck with it for a while, like maybe ten minutes. Check on the chicken by lifting it up with tongs, which always make me feel very professional. Like, “look at me wielding these tongs.”

When the chicken’s nice and brown on the skin side, flip it to the nonskin side and brown five or so minutes more. Then dump in your bowl of leeks etc, and add a bit more salt. Stir it around so the veggies are coated in chicken oils and maybe starting to wilt a little bit. In fact, a great thing to do right now would be to let the veggies sweat until the Brita pitcher finishes filtering the water you’re about to dump in there. A pitcher and a half ought to do it. Or, you know, enough to cover the pot’s contents and then a little more, if your hippie roommates don’t have a Brita pitcher or something.

Put the lid on your stockpot, turn the heat up to high, and do dishes until the soup reaches a boil. Take it down to a simmer and go do your laundry. Entertain fantasies … ok, I’m leaving the second person for now. At this point I was entertaining fantasies that I’d get Jake to come out to Brooklyn and eat some of the soup. I’d finally started really wanting to cook for him, an impulse that was half freaking me out and half making me happy. Also I just was feeling like I wanted things to happen on my turf, on my terms.

But while I was at the laundromat he called and invited me to a 7:30 screening of the Simpsons movie. 7:30 movie means leaving the Beast House at 6:30, and it was like 5 when he called. I would have to rush through my laundry and my soup, and probably not have time to shower. Also I had zero interest in seeing the Simpsons movie. So I said yes, of course.

Anyway, back to YOUR soup. You’ll want to let it simmer for a little over an hour, til the chicken is falling off the bones. During the last 10 minutes of cooking, add your reserved crushed garlic cloves and adjust seasoning, which means just seriously go nuts with the salt. You can always water it down a little bit. Chicken soup should be salty. It’s almost like (gross!) a body fluid. Like tears, really.

Yank those chicken quarters out of the soup with your handy tongs, put them on a platter to cool, and strain the rest of the soup, discarding veg. When the chicken’s cool — or, hey, if you’ve got somewhere to be and you don’t mind burning your fingertips a bit! — peel it off the bones into bite-size chunks and reunite it with the broth.

Before serving the soup, add pepper and, if you’re feeling fancy, any kind of chiffonaded parsley or matzo ball or noodle or dumpling or basil leaf or lime juice or ramen you desire. I slammed down a monster bowl of this before leaving for the movie, congratulating myself on my good work the entire time, pausing only to go back to the pot for more chicken. It was probably the last time today (yesterday) I did anything right.

Mercifully we missed the movie, owing to Jake’s lateness, not mine. We ate an overprized pizza at the kind of restaurant he likes (good, trendy, a little precious). I was feeling subdued and a little peevish til he reached across the table and touched my palm. These little acknowledgments of affection haven’t seemed so important to me since seriously middle school. We talked about how my exboyfriend isn’t “ready” to see me or talk to me to have the “it’s really over and I’m not coming back” conversation, even though it’s been a month, and how I’m mad and sad about that, and also about how I’m still paying bills and rent. “Breaking up is hard to do,” Jake said, and he doesn’t just know from the song. He’s definitely still reeling from the end of his first grown-up relationship, which only really ended about three months ago. I think he’s still sort of in love with her? He swears he isn’t, that she loves him. She definitely still emails him a lot (what, it’s MY fault people leave their gmail open?). He still writes for her (fuhhcking trust fund retaaarded) magazine. We didn’t talk about that, though. We didn’t talk about anything unpleasant until later, after we were back at his apartment, lying in his bed, postcoitally watching boxing.

“So when do you leave for vacation?” I asked, knowing it was the beginning of the wrong conversation, wanting to have that conversation anyway. Maybe it was the full moon that made me do it. Or maybe it was just time to figure out what was really going on.

“I’m leaving Friday, coming back on Monday.”

“And you’re going to …”

“Dubrovnik.”

“Are you just … going there by yourself?”

“No.”

Worst. silence. of. all. time.

“I thought you knew that?”

“I guess I kind of did. I guess I was kind of pretending to myself that I didn’t.”

See, here is the thing about Jake. He’s practically perfect in every way. Like, designed for me, seriously. I’ve never even been friends with a guy whose brain is so much like mine. He’s smart and funny in the way that I am smart and funny. And also, unlike me (or like how I’m trying to be?) he’s fiercely independent, a real grown-up. Definitely unlike me, he’s a dancer. He also boxes. He knows French and Italian. He’s lived abroad. He has a tattoo on his back of Serge Gainsbourg’s face, another on his arm that says ‘Mom,’ and this other one that I think is Silver Jews album art that crawls up his perfect torso. He has the kind of torso that you see in photos and you just always unavoidably imagine your tongue tracing down from the navel and swerving to the side and cutting down over along one of the hipbones and then tugging down the waistband etc.

So of course he has an ‘open relationship’ with a girl who lives in London, who he talks to maybe once every two weeks, who he meets up with for periodic international booty calls. How could he NOT have one of those, really? I mean, he lived in Paris for two years. Also, is a rich kid. Or, as my exboyfriend William put it when I told him we’d kissed on a staff retreat, “He’s so cheesy and bougie.”

I guess I hadn’t put two and two together re: Dubvrovnik because I hadn’t really wanted to. For the past few weeks, I’ve been so high on Jake, making playlists where all the songs have ‘love’ in the title, just feeling so alive and connected to my body, smiling and having the whole world smile with me. I guess somewhere deep down I knew. Last night was sort of the end of my manic happiness phase, though. It’s good that it’s over. It’s time for me to see things as they really are.

So how are things? Well, here’s Jake’s take.

“When I first met you, I was just attracted to you. But it seemed so far outside the realm of possibility that we’d ever end up together, so I let myself be really over the top when I was flirting with you. And then on that staff retreat you, like, became a real person to me. I started to have feelings for you. And then you broke up with your boyfriend, and I felt like I was probably just a symbol to you. That you were sort of … fetishizing me.”

“The anti-William.”

“Right, exactly. I mean, didn’t it occur to you that I might just be, like, this rebound dude?”

“Yeah, of course. But lately …”

“Yeah. We have these feelings for each other now. It’s getting sort of intense. And I’m worried about hurting you, because I know I’m not ready to be in a serious relationship right now. Getting out of my last one was so painful. I can’t let myself be that vulnerable again.”

“You really think you get to choose?”

He shrugged. “I think I can.”

I stared out his window onto the street below, then up at the fat moon hanging there in the sky. “I’ve been trying to. It hasn’t been working for me.”

And then I told him exactly how I’ve been feeling, omitting any mention, of course, of the “falling in love” thing. I told him about how I used to feel like flirting with him was a joke, and then there was a moment when the joke tipped into seriousness, but now when I think back it seems like that moment came earlier than I’d thought, but that maybe I’m romanticizing it. I told him he was lucky, that I’d never let myself be this vulnerable before, that I’d never been the pursuer, the one with less power. I told him that it’s too late to worry about me getting hurt because I am getting hurt, that I’m not going to be second to anyone else in any relationship.

I got up and started putting on my dress. “I don’t want you to leave. I understand why you feel like you have to, but I don’t want you to.”

“I just want to be important to you.”

“You are important to me,” he said, and the look in his eyes was enough to convince me to take my dress back off and to lie back down next to him. We just lay there in each others’ arms for a few minutes, hearts pounding. I wanted to cry and part of me still wanted to leave and another part of me registered the throb against my thigh and pushed into it, and then we were kissing and seconds later we were fucking and it was different than it had been before, like, realer. It was that late night kind of sex where everyone is too tired for anything fancy. He wasn’t performing for the pornographer’s invisible camera. He was just looking into my eyes and giving me exactly what I wanted and occasionally a little bit more. And when it was over I fell right to sleep.

I woke up at 3:50 and felt like crying and I didn’t want to cry in his bed so I threw on my dress and left. By 4:10 I was walking down Greenpoint Avenue, listening to ‘Angel of the Morning’ on my iPod and thinking about the blog post I would write, and also about how I would maybe try not to see Jake anymore.

Except in the office.

Dear fucking god.

At least today I’m working from home, though, and you know what that means: I can eat the leftovers of the soup! Boy I’m looking forward to them.