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In October, to tighten my grip on the last handful of sanity I’ve got left, I pick up some shifts at my favorite local chocolatier for the holiday season.
There’s no room in the kitchen for despair, especially not during the holiday rush. Chocolate has to be melted, cream infused, both at the right temperature before they’re combined, cocoa butter added to temper, mixed until your arm muscles feel stretched like a biang-biang noodle, then cut, then dipped, then garnished, and packed away in a manner that screams YUM! TASTY!
If it doesn’t scream that at the right volume then something has gone amiss. Perhaps the ganache set too soon, or the garnishing fingers were not swift nor delicate enough, or someone inadvertently slipped in a teaspoon of you-know-what (despair), and that simply won’t do.
Working in chocolate is like foraging for skills that are, if not transferable, at least fun-to-have. For example, today I tied ribbons around boxes into bows for a wedding order.
There’s more to ribbon-tying than you might think, especially if you’re usually a bunny-ears bitch like me. When everything’s said and done, the loops have to be small and dainty, and the cinch in the middle needs to lay flat. To tidy up frayed edges, the ends are trimmed at an appropriate length. Re-tie until it looks like it belongs on display at Macy’s.
I look and tighten and snip, again and again, until my fingers move on their own, and I think that ribbons may be the opposite of despair. No one despairs when they see a ribbon; they think, “How quirky! I wonder what treats await behind this plumage of whimsy and joy.” Or, if you’re a bunny-ears bitch like me: “Fuck, I’ve got 130 of these to tie.”
I’m a bunny-ears bitch because it was the first way I learned how to tie my shoes. At one point I tried to learn how to do it the other way, the way the cool kids did it, but it never stuck. This stressed me out to the point of exclusively going bunny-ears until I had to become a professional bow-tyer.
It’s this kind of avoidant personality that would flee the continent last-minute, skidding away from the chomping maw of emotional discomfort by hijacking some friends’ trip to London.
We drink tea and eat doner kebab. We are museum patrons and pub-goers. We thrift leather jackets and buy Broadway tickets — Les Miserables, naturally.
Near the end of the play, Jean Valjean’s gentle tenor sings, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” I’m not a religious gal, not even a little bit, but I weep and don’t know why.
Our booling-about knows no limits; Thanksgiving this year is spent in Amsterdam, a 24 hour send with no accommodations. When we eat beans that taste like sour dirt, the city cracks open, falls on its head, invites us to dive into its goopy naked brain. And really — who am I to say no to Amsterdam?
To reward us, it bursts into vivid color. New sailors of the world, we embark on a canal cruise. Next to jet-lagged Americans and quiet Dutch locals, we are transformed into annoying wind-up dolls that burst into peals of laughter with no warning. The commentary buzzing through our headphones tells us of Dutch history and architecture in a British accent, and I focus on the mechanics of the windowpane next to me and my inability to open it.
Suddenly we leave the canal, thrust into open waters obfuscated only by the occasional glittering tombs of glass. What used to be Shell HQ is now a tourist attraction. Another corporate office is a maze of steel and mirror with edges folding into each other — somehow beautiful despite the massive fluorescent BOOKING.COM sign hanging on its edge. All of it is shining and it feels like I am both expanding and being swallowed whole.
“Someone made this,” my friend says. “Someone made this and it’s being used for Booking.com.”
“Someone probably made this for Booking.com,” another friend says. “You think artists can afford this?” They launch into a conversation about what is made possible and rendered impossible by the way corporate money moves in our world, but I am rendered incapable of contributing to this conversation due to the beans that taste like sour dirt. Instead, my mind catches on the first bit.
Someone made this, and I am struck by how I miss it, how much I miss making things.
I turn off the canal cruise commentary and listen to the dappling waters. The ocean doesn’t have a British accent, and it murmurs something about how I don’t need to be a person anymore if I really really don’t want to; I could instead be a fish swimming alongside the tourist-laden cruise boats, or a bird nesting inside the BOOKING.COM sign.
I look at my friends and I feel a knot of guilt for being tempted so. How nice would it be to shit on top of fomerly-Shell-HQ. How nice it would be to take a break from being me.
Hmm, the ocean says, kind of in a judgy way. The guilt-knot tightens as I struggle to be thankful on this silly colonizer holiday, then loosens a notch when the ocean says, by the way, my name is Diana. Like the princess.
Well, Diana, maybe I’ll have better luck as a bird or a fish. Or! even a boat for tourists. I can make tourists happy. I know the best place for mini dutch pancakes.
What about what you can make as a person? the ocean says, ignoring my comment about the pancakes. And I say nothing, because all I’ve been able to make as of late is grief.
Unfortunately, the ocean / the people’s princess is a bit of a mind reader.
So make grief, she says. Her waters are black and reflective, a splash chorus, matter-of-fact and Sisyphean in the way they lap at the boat.
Again, I say nothing, which turns out to be fine because the debate is over — the ocean is busy and doesn’t stand for backtalk. As a parting kindness, she takes me back into the canals rimmed with brick and glass and the austere aura of the Dutch (who are, aside from being skilled architects, also grief-makers in their own right, as we all are, Diana says).
When we arrive back in London, we are compelled by the urge to dance.
We are club rats, not quite as skilled as the undulating dancers onstage, yet still we thrash about anyway, sing along anyway, fling our arms around one another and make bunny-ears-bitch-bows with our ribbon limbs.
When the knot tightens, the loops are not dainty and the edges are frayed — yet still! — we become a collective container for the fucks we have left to give.
And for all we have yet to make.
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Another beautiful piece