Can you believe I used to ask William what he wanted to eat for dinner, and offer him options? I did.  And sometimes I’d  skip that and just announce what we were having, and he’d say “Oh come on, not pork stir fry [or whatever] again!”

Mayyybe this is why I’ve been living on sandwiches and takeout and scrambled eggs for the last three months.

Today, though, I decided I would go to the trouble of making a real meal for myself.  I didn’t feel like doing it — my stomach hurt and I felt sad and lonely — but I went to A Cook’s Companion and bought a saucepot with a tight-fitting lid for rice and a shallow big frying pan for stir-fry.  I’d left these things’ analogs, ones I’d used hundreds of times, behind in the kitchen of the apartment where I’d lived with William.  All the things I left behind, I’ve been replacing piecemeal. I tried to do one big shopping trip to replace them all at once right when I first moved in, but inevitably there were a bunch of things I didn’t realize I needed.  In these circumstances, there’s no way to know what you’re missing right away.  You’ll be halfway through a recipe and then realize you don’t have, like, a liquid measuring cup.

(You’ll be going through the motions and halfway through, realize that some key component is missing.  But you’ll go ahead anyway because what are you supposed to do, go to bed hungry?)

When I first started to develop this staple of my repertoire, I was reading a lot of Ayun Halliday’s zine, the East Village Inky, and sort of fantasizing that someday, not soon but soonish, I’d be living her life — brownstone Brooklyn, two kids, adoring husband — with William. I definitely never admitted this, even really to myself.  But why would you live with someone — why would you stay with someone for six years — if you didn’t somewhat think that they were the person you’d end up with?  Of course I talked a big game about not believing in marriage. But I had detailed, specific ideas about proposals and weddings that I would never have told you about if you’d held a gun to my head.

Anyway, Ayun’s zine had some ideas about what to do with “1/4 lb of ground pork” that I later combined with a Cook’s Illustrated recipe for a Chinese-ish stir-fry made of sliced pork tenderloin.  First you cut up a quick-cooking vegetable or two into bite-sized pieces.  I like: baby bok choy or Savoy cabbage or snow peas or red bell pepper or bamboo shoots, or a combination.  Then you take a something like 1/4-1/2 lb of ground pork and sprinkle it with soy sauce and cooking sherry and mush it around. In a bowl, you mix together a little more sherry, 1/2 cup chicken stock, 1 tablespoon oyster sauce, 1/4 tsp cornstarch, 1/4 tsp white pepper, a splash of rice vinegar and a splash of sesame oil.  In another bowl you mix a bunch of finely chopped garlic and ginger with a splash of peanut oil.  Then you stir-fry the pork til it’s done, remove it from the pan, stir-fry the vegetables, shove them to the side put the garlic-ginger mixture in a little plop in the pan with them, count to 20, then stir it all around, add the pork back in, dump the sauce on, cook it all together, then serve over white rice, topping with scallions.  This is probably my favorite thing to make and eat.

Except every moment of the preparation process (he used to tell me I couldn’t cook rice, well look at how well this rice turned out, must have been that old pot) and every bite (I am putting this bowl down on the coffee table and it’s my bowl, I’m not serving anyone else first) reminded me of William.  I was just finishing up the dishes when R.E.C. called.  “Are you at home? Check your email.”  She’d shown her ex (I forget right now what his secret-blog alias is!) her latest post, and, I guess, this blog, for the first time, and his response had made her cry and think and try to analyze.

We talked about the feeling of being alone, and how weird and uncomfortable it is to live for yourself when you’re used to living for someone else. Living for yourself is, I guess, some people’s default mode (male people mostly).  You should always be living for yourself, I’ve heard.  But how to shake this feeling of being so small and so uncared-for, the feeling of “nobody cares what I do or think or feel”?

“I could choke on a bone tonight and nobody would notice for days and Doree’s dog would eat my face,” I told R.E.C.  She laughed. “You do know that you’re actually quoting Bridget Jones’ Diary right now, right?”  I paused in my pacing around the rooftop and put out my cigarette (since nobody cares what I do, I’ve been smoking a little bit).

“Well the worst part about being single is realizing that all the cliches are true,” I told her.

The other worst part about being single and living a cliche is that you start thinking exclusively in song lyrics sometimes.  Like: “You really can’t give love in this condition still you know how you need it.”  And: “I’ve been throwing my arms around every boy I see. They only remind me of you.”