So on a regular basis, I invade my husband’s Twitter mentions and tell him to stop whatever he’s doing and come suck face with me. Lately, he’s been working on instructional videos for his new company. While he’s great on camera (look, he just is! It’s not even me being biased because I think he’s a smokeshow!), actually doing the A/V work is pretty uncharted territory for him, so he gets on Twitter to ask people for advice on how things look, and what he should do differently. A lot of the answers are really helpful and supportive.

I also have things to say.

Lower the camera and take off shirt and maybe pants.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

okay but why are you still wearing a shirt, i thought i made myself clear

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 27, 2021

Anyway, apparently I’ve been doing stuff like this for a while?

I just found a picture of you as a naked toddler holding a bucket over your winky.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) November 4, 2016

Honestly, I’m just kind of a nightmare of a wife.

YOU CAN REPORT IT FOR ASSMENT.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

Anyway, today I did it again.

TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

The thing about Rand is that while he’s pretty good at playing the straight-man in this carnival ride of wedded whimsical fuckery, every now and then I push a little too far and … well … he’ll call me on my bluff.

pic.twitter.com/J0lw5yrU6z

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 3, 2021

Touché, Mr. Fishkin. Though I’d like to think we’re all winners here: him, for having that chest, me, for getting to appreciate it on the regular, and the good people of Twitter, who get to see it for the first time.

Now if you’ll excuse me …

sneaking into your office right now to make out

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

When our friend arrived at our door, Rand looked at him and said, “Hey, guess what? We’re all fully vaccinated.” They’d gotten their second shots on the same day, and the CDC recommended waiting time for antibodies to build up had elapsed. They hugged on my porch, and I stared like I was watching a documentary, something beautiful I was removed from, before I realized I didn’t have to be simply an observer. I threw myself into the hug as well. We stood there on the porch, and another friend who is staying with us (another once-commonplace event made impossible, etc., etc.) saw the exchange and said, casually, “Oh, are we group hugging?” throwing her arms around us all.

My local grocery store had signs saying that fully vaccinated customers didn’t need to wear masks, based on the recommendation of the CDC. We all still wore them anyway. A few days later, they took down those signs, and replaced them with ones saying, basically, “Nevermind, keep wearing the masks, please, the CDC has no idea what’s going on.” For me, nothing had changed. I even had a dream about it, the old cliché about going to school naked, updated for the pandemic age: I was indoors, in public, without a mask. I kept apologizing to everyone, woke up relieved it wasn’t real. A few days later a maskless woman at the Goodwill berated me for wearing plastic gloves to pick through the shelves (something I do whenever I shop there, not because of Covid, but because I once found what I hope was cat poop on a sweater). The CDC ping-pongs back and forth. No one seems to exactly know what to do. Are we wearing masks? Are we hugging? Is it safe to eat indoors? Is this the end or just a lull? Why didn’t I tell that woman to shut her stupid face?

Later in the week, we went out to dinner again, this time eating indoors for the first time since February of last year. Our friends met us outside, and the hug we fell into was effortless, so that I didn’t even realize it at first. For a second, I’d forgotten to be amazed by this foreign thing, of stepping into the sacred six feet of space around one another.

Someone asked how I was doing, and in the aftermath of my second shot, I told them I could not stop crying. “Just openly weeping at everything,” I said. “I don’t really understand it.”

“Oh, me too,” they replied. “I read something that said it’s not PTSD we’re dealing with, because PTSD is for things that have passed. And this is something that we’re still in.”

There is the truth of it. The world is opening up, or parts of it are, at least – slowly, cracking open like a window left shut too long. The wind rushes in, that flash of fresh air, but I’m still hesitant to take a breath. I’m told this feeling is “social re-entry anxiety.” (We already have a name for it, for this nervousness about stepping back into the world.) More people are set to die globally from the pandemic in 2021 than 2020. Things are far from over, and trauma, as Ed Yong notes in The Atlantic, is lingering and unpredictable. Experts (in my mind’s eye, a group people in lab coats, against a dark and infinite background, holding clipboards) say that this wasn’t it. That the real big one is coming. I try to stop my imagination from going to dark places. I’ve read Station Eleven too many times.

“These next three weeks of summer are going to be great, until the variant hits,” a friend teases, and we all laugh and wince simultaneously. It hits too close to the fear that stops us from enjoying these moments thoroughly: we’re afraid of everything being snatched away again.

I try to be in the moment, but it’s hard to know exactly what this moment is. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t take away the fact that there was a tunnel to begin with. When you’re in it, your only focus is on getting through to the other side, more or less intact. It’s only afterwards, blinking in the light, that you have a second to turn around and think, well … that was awful. That’s where I am now: looking back at the dark we’ve just stepped out of, trying to acclimate to the brightness, and wondering if – and how long- it will last.

I have heard that some people need a clean workspace in order to write – the unproven hypothesis that it promotes productivity. So I wince a little when I think of my office, a place where Rand will occasionally poke his head through the door and ask, “What is happening in here?” His tone is curious rather than judgmental. The room is like a science project, an anomaly when compared to the rest of our home.

“I’M GOOD AT OTHER THINGS,” I yell by way of reply. The bacchanalia of papers and dust and empty mugs on my desk is oddly comforting. I’ve hit organizational rock-bottom. I can scribble on pieces of paper, I can pile mail on top of more stacks of mail. I can shuffle Post-It notes that have lost their adhesive quality and are now just squares of brightly colored paper, moving them around like a Vegas card dealer. The only place to go from here is up.

I am an organized person. My mother says I inherited this quality from my father. She claims that fastidiousness can’t be taught; you either have it or you don’t. I’m inclined to disagree, because her argument removes personal responsibility from the equation. Order is something I work at, something I’ve learned. But I see her point – she loses her keys so regularly I’m not sure she ever had them. She once misplaced a piece of paper the instant I handed it to her, making it vanish like a magician performing a parlor trick. It follows that I must have been born with a sense of order, because I sure as heck didn’t learn it from her.

I’ve been procrastinating on my book for a while. Not making the progress I hope for, feeling uninspired by, well – gestures broadly at everything. No one wants to hear about it – the only thing worse than a self-satisfied writer is a self-loathing one. When the only thing standing in your way is you, you don’t get to complain. Sitting in front of my computer, the page count stagnant, I decided to tackle other projects. I hung curtains and cleaned out my closet. I threw out bags of items. Had I kept the things that sparked joy? I wasn’t sure. Mostly, I had just sparked existential dread. I felt like a failure.

My office was the last hold out, my desk the final boss. There are no before photos. The shame is too great. I shredded documents like I was an mid-level exec in a Ponzi scheme. I found stickers from the Washington State Book Awards that I was supposed to put on copies of my memoir, published years ago. I found the actual paper copy of my James Beard Award, and wondered if maybe I wasn’t a failure. Maybe I just needed to clean out my office more. (This moment of confidence was short-lived.)

I went through all the tiny scraps of paper I saved, ones which at the time I could not throw out. I always thought there might be an answer on them, something that would crack my manuscript wide open, fill in all my plot holes, save my protagonist.

I … I saved this for some reason.

“Filled in all my plot holes.” #headdesk

The realization that organizing my office wasn’t the answer to my writer’s block hits me like a wave. I gently rest my head on my newly cleaned desk. There is plenty of room to do this now. My office is neat and tidy. It is not a reflection of the innerworkings of my brain, except in this respect: it feels a little too empty, and I don’t know what to do next.

P.S. – Yes, I have a Chris Pine calendar because my friends are awesome and he is the best Chris, after Lloyd.

Scrolling my social media, I see a stream of selfies; people receiving their vaccines, eyes smiling over their masks, a shirt-sleeve rolled up, something exceptionally vulnerable about that stretch of skin on the upper arm. Everything opening again. It feels both overdue and impossible all at once.

The thing that I – a shameless extrovert – have maintained over the last year is that when the world opened up again I would run screaming into it, possibly naked. I would unleash a torrent of affection and attention on whoever was willing, feeding off of the company of others, a social vampire. But as we’ve started seeing people – my mother, Rand’s grandfather, those few friends who, due to circumstance or profession are already vaccinated – I find myself unsure of how to return the world I once knew.

I don’t know how exactly to get back to normal anymore.

I remember those first few harrowing weeks when my town and state went on lockdown, stores and restaurants and gyms closing, my friends with children panicking at the idea of schools closing for two weeks (“TWO WEEKS!” a friend said to me now, a year later, a sputtering laugh coming out of her.) I didn’t know what to do with myself, with my days. I didn’t know how to exist in a world that wasn’t humming and busy, a sudden halting of the Indiana Jones animations of planes that I always imagined moving across a map whenever I traveled. I felt unmoored, rather paradoxically, from being stuck indoors. And then weeks melted into months and waves of despair hit again and again and I hit some sort of existential crisis (what happens to a travel writer when they are unable to travel?). I forgot what it was like before, and a new normal took over. Staying home, and walking into the street when anyone came towards me on the sidewalk. The lower half of someone’s face taking on a new, stunning intimacy. I wrote about being at home, I tried to work on my novel, I wrote nothing at all, I may have wasted a year.

It would all be fine, I told myself, when things went back to normal.

A week ago, some vaccinated friends invited us over to a backyard dinner. I figured I would step right back into it, but before I even left the house, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten exactly how to do it. I stared at an entire closet full of clean clothes – everything that wasn’t pajamas or workout wear was just hanging there – and was utterly baffled by what to do with it. Do you wear a blazer to dinner with friends? Do you talk about the weather? How do social interactions work? Am I being weird? Have I just been sitting here thinking about how weird I’m being, and staring at a spot on the ground with a weird look on my face, and now everyone is expecting me to say something? Or maybe they haven’t noticed at all, because I am not the center of the universe, honestly, why would I think that I am? I was suddenly on conversational training wheels. The CDC gives us parameters for hanging out, but no one tells you how awkward it might be.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. In the quest to get back to normal, it’s easy to ignore how the last year has changed us all. The things that once felt like a reflex, an effortless sort of second-nature, now feel foreign. We once hugged our friends, and we ate meals together, and we all sat around tables indoors. And then we lost loved ones and we were alone and we didn’t know when it would end, and it felt like all of that worked itself down to our marrow. Some of us lost a year of time, and others lost the futures they were promised. Movie theaters can reopen, but you still carry your grief. Something deep down that you can’t quite put your finger on, that you hesitate to call trauma, because that feels like an exaggeration, that feels too heavy, that feels like you are mitigating the real trauma of others. But what else is it? How else to describe it? The thing that made your grandparents save scraps of tin foil and refuse to throw out food. The thing that made your parents worry that you were going to be kidnapped, because of what happened to that poor boy on the news. The thing that – you fear – will make you keep your distance from other people and disinfect your hands until the end of your days.

How do you go back to normal when that world is already gone?

There are antibodies building inside of me, but my brain is taking longer to catch up. That’s the thing that no one told me while I sat at home, waiting for this moment – that I might not be ready for it. That the world opening up again might take just as much getting used to as the world shutting down. I stare at the leaves on the trees outside, back again after a long winter, and wonder what their secret is.

Or maybe have at it, I’m not your mother.

Okay … ready?

Rand’s pandemic hobby has been cooking.

PUT THAT SHOE DOWN, WE DO NOT THROW THINGS.

Look, I know, I know. This is the last thing that you need to hear about childless couple who normally travels but is now stuck in their home for a year. Ideally, you would like to be reading about how one of us snapped and cannibalized the other, or that we’re at least starting to grate on one another’s nerves. And while we occasionally had moments like that (sometimes the cannibalization and the nerve-grating happened simultaneously as evidenced by the photo below) for the most part we just sort of … got along.

Look, we had the occasional fight, we occasionally had to go for a walk because the other was just “a lot right now”, but for the most part, things were okay, and I think a big part of that had to do, I am realizing now, with my husband making sure I was regularly fed and hydrated.

So maybe his pandemic hobby was neutralizing the fine middle-aged cannibal in the house. I still think it was a win-win. In the before times, dinner parties were our thing, that obnoxious pastime of people in their late 30s and beyond, bottles of wine and trays of charcuterie, mains and passed sides, me bringing out dessert and him pulling out bottles of scotch. It felt effortless and second-nature, was what we did, having people over and cooking for them, or going out to a restaurant with friends. At the start of a given week Rand would remind me of who we had dinner with in the days to come. Inevitably we’d have plans for at least four or five of the nights, more if we were on the road.

There was a novelty, early in the pandemic when it was just the two of the us (“We are eating in front of the TV!” “We are cooking just for ourselves!” “Our President is actively trying to kill us all!”), and we leaned into it because everything else was just too sad and scary to consider. After a while, Rand needed bigger challenges, and he started delving into new recipes. We watched Midnight Diner, a relaxing and hard-to-classify show that takes place in, obviously, a diner, a small one in Tokyo. He missed travel, he became wistful about our trip to Japan. He bought himself a donabe pot and temporarily lost his mind.

This was not the end of it. It rarely is with Rand. In the words of that fallen star, he’s always got to be starting something. He will roll out fresh pasta like he learned to do in Bologna.

At least once a month he will roast giant marrow bones and make a pot of stock, tossing in an entire chicken. He uses it to make risotto, and when his grandfather was fully vaccinated we had him over to help.

He makes me steaks and soups and pastas. He garnishes and composes and fries and braises and grills and simmers.

I have spent years writing about our travels, felt like our lives were an open book, hell, even wrote the damn book, but I’ve been tweeting out these photos, and it’s felt like opening people up to our home. The responses are occasionally overly-scrutinizing (people seem obsessed about the quantity of food that we cook, which feels inappropriate at best), but for the most part, lovely.

Keep posting your dude cooking. It’s my favorite activity and your evangelizing is helping to normalize it. Dual knife blocks is a nice touch.

— Gregg McLennan (@Strayarc) April 10, 2021

I love his aprons!

— Mary Swift (@swiftlytweet) April 10, 2021

Need that in my belly STAT

— One Fresh Pillow (@OneFreshPillow) April 11, 2021

Your husband really twinkles

— Colominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolominipiccolomi (@MavetyStreet) April 5, 2021

Still, when online abusers are particularly active in my thread, they attack my husband’s masculinity specifically because he cooks for me.

They tell me to enjoy it, because he’s going to inevitably leave me (for a man, because they need to add homophobia to it).

Man this long con of his is loooooooong. pic.twitter.com/TpCZH2OeVD

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) March 21, 2021

“Why are they so invested in you leaving me?” I ask.

“Because if you are loved and happy, what does that say about their lives?”

There is something else, too. Something less personal. Professional chefs are often male. As a society, we’re comfortable with men cooking in that context – doing so as a job, in command of a restaurant. But a man cooking at home is occupying a space that we often expect women to – one of a caretaker. He is taking on invisible labor that we are used to dismissing. And in doing so, forcing misogynists into an uncomfortable reckoning: domestic work is important, valuable, and hard.

I tell him I can cook, or that we can get take-out, and sometimes he takes me up on the offer. I occasionally make dessert. If I’m quick enough, I can get the dishes done before he has a chance.

“Still – think how devastated I’d be if you left. I wouldn’t see it coming,” I say.

“Neither of us would.”

“No one was more surprised than us!”

I tease him that the worst part would be that I’d have to cook for myself, and he tells me that he could still come over and cook for me.

“And we could still make out?”

“Definitely.”

Maybe, I suggest tentatively, it would be best if he didn’t leave me in the first place. And he agrees that maybe that’s the best way to go. I mean, think about how brilliant and devastating this ruse will be if it goes on for another fifty years and then it ends.

It’ll be just heartbreaking.

Vaccines are rolling out – slow at first, and now a steady trickle. My friends and I keep checking in on one another as we have for the last year, though the topic has switched from “You hanging in there?” to “Any side-effects?” We’ve become a little bit like science experiments, marigolds clipped to electrodes. I have many hypotheses about what the effects of the world opening up again will be like after more than a year of trauma and death and lockdowns and the politicization of basic science. In the words of Jessie Spano, I’m so excited, and I’m so scared.

“Do you have your superpowers?” a man asked me as I left.

I remind myself of the luck and the privilege that allowed for this, with having internet and a governor who wasn’t corrupt, with having access and the ability to book my shot.

I treated many really sick Covid-19 patients today.

All wanted to get vaccinated but didn’t know how to navigate appointments, transportation. Might sound easy, but for many, it’s not.

Expanding eligibility doesn’t always mean accessibility, especially for the most vulnerable.

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) April 6, 2021

Rand was giddy about it when I came home – “I can’t believe it,” he said. I couldn’t either. When we went into lockdown last March he told me we’d be through by August.

“Six months, tops,” he said. By my birthday at the latest.

The time came and went. I turned 40 in lockdown, argued that it didn’t count while the skin under my neck flappingly disagreed. His grandmother died. My nephew started to walk and talk. My friends had babies. Time passed at the same time that it stood still, and I watched a lot of TV. When talk of the vaccine started, Rand said we’d probably not be able to get it until the end of summer, and he was wrong again, but this time in the best way. When that needle went in my arm I almost cried, not from the pain but because I realized I had been carrying all those damn tears around, everywhere I didn’t go.

“I need you to know,” I told him, “about some of the side-effects of the vaccine.”

“Oh?”

“I might get cranky if I don’t snack regularly.”

“I see.”

“That one seems to be unfortunately permanent.”

“And we’re going to attribute that to the vaccine, are we?”

“We are.”

Other things that, in the last two days, I have claimed were side-effects to the vaccine:

1. Demanding to be hand-fed Cheet-os as though I am a baby bird.
   –
2. Crying while watching The Great Pottery Thrown Down, a program which should not actually elicit tears, but reminds me that my studio has been closed for a year, and I don’t know if I still remember how to throw, or how to apply surface decoration, or the name of the woman with the dark hair who inspired me to spend a year reading female authors. Also, one of the judges cries all the time and it’s wonderful, truly, but that sort of thing is contagious.
   –
3. Farting.
   –
4. Eating an entire bag of kettle corn for dinner.
   –
5. Crying after learning that 7 million people will not get the vaccine because they are concerned about the cost of it, and they don’t realize that it is free.
   –
6. Being very scared that I am going to look back on this year having accomplished nothing besides surviving it.
   –
7. Crying while watching that very stupid Google commercial where people do searches and at first the searches are all “pandemic family activities” and then the cursor deletes “pandemic” and oh my god.
   – 
8. Absolutely losing my mind with sobs when I ended a phone call with my brother and heard my little nephew say “Bye-bye” in the background.
   –
9. Screaming “I have had just about enough of everyone’s bullshit!” and then refusing to specify who everyone is and what bullshit I am referring to.
   –
10. Crying while watching The Muppets because technically shouldn’t some of them have died by now?
    –
11. Losing several hours to looking up the lifespan of the average Muppet.
    

    Oh god.

    –

12.  Going to the store to buy groceries and forgetting the one thing I went there to buy but picking up a whole bunch of other things that were not on my list but looked good at the time.
    –
13. An overwhelming worry that I’ve forgotten how to be in the world.
    –
14. More crying.

So, that’s where I am. Normalcy still feels elusive and I miss everyone and everything. If I think too hard about it and the last year, my eyesight gets all watery, and it makes it hard to see, but still – there it is, that stupid light at the end of that stupid tunnel, forever too late for some of us.

“It’s a side-effect,” I say into his shoulder as we sit on the couch.

“Okay,” he replies, and puts on a show. It makes me cry, but what did I expect?

Like, I’ve always presumed that I was a relatively hinged person, but here I am, utterly unhinged. For some of you, this will be unsurprising. Some of you will be thinking, “Geraldine, YOU WERE NEVER HINGED. YOU HAVE FEWER HINGES THAN A SLIDING DOOR.” And I hear you, friends. I understand that I am very good at giving the impression of being *waves hands around in a fluttering fashion to suggest madness* but that is just theatrics. For the most part, in my everyday life, I am calm! And reasonable! And I do not cry while watching movie trailers!

I handle all sorts of things without turning into a fire hydrant of feelings. Death threats in my Twitter feed? No problem! Weird health issues that result in my menstrual cycle seeming resembling a risque, one-woman staging of Carrie? Fine! (Also, someone please make this.) So much career malaise that I’ve literally forgotten how to write words? FLARP.

And so I want to be clear that I did not cry this week because we have an infestation of mice somewhere in our home. The mice are simply a metaphor. A metaphor for the fact that my life is infested. With mice. AND ALSO OTHER THINGS.

I am not particularly skittish when it comes to small scurrying creatures, thanks to a handful of formative years spent in Florida. An overzealous science teacher taught us that in order to escape a gator, we needed to run in a zig-zag line. Years later this information remains indelible in mind, the sort of knowledge that you will almost certainly never need, but your brain holds on to it, just in case.

Growing up in a swampland that was constantly trying to kill me, I became very, very accustomed to all manner of horrifying creatures. I learned that some cockroaches can fly (but only if they truly believe in themselves). That 3-foot long snakes can slip into the narrow crack beneath your front door and patiently wait in the middle of your living room for you to come home. That you can seal a bag of cereal tightly, shove it into a zip-loc bag, and still find a cluster of tiny insects have taken up residents there (you will only notice them when they start drowning in a bowl of milk).

Nothing that Washington had to offer could faze me in that regard. The bugs were smaller and less aggressive (except for the house spiders, which were the size of my palm, and kept trying to get me to fund their startups). Most of the animals that we encountered didn’t want to eat us. Sure, the crows in my neighborhood are assholes, but in their defense, so am I.

I found the mouse last week. I thought it was dead. I have a bucket which I keep downstairs for soaking laundry. The bucket was empty, a towel draped over it. I picked up the towel, and inside the bucket saw the mouse, and roughly a dozen tiny mouse turds. I thought that it had slowly died of dehydration in my laundry bucket. Convinced I had inflicted a painful death upon it, I, a reasonable woman of nearly 40 years of age, walked up two flights of stairs from the basement to our bedroom, sobbing incoherently.

Rand is very good at understanding me when I am gasping for air and have snot dribbling from my nose perilously close to my upper lip.

“I KILLED IT,” I sobbed. He gently pulled me onto his lap.

“Do you want me to throw the mouse away?” he asked.

I nodded with the quiet gravitas of a pouting first-grader.

I followed him downstairs, and he dutifully picked up the bucket and paused, looking inside.

“Geraldine, this mouse is very much alive.”

“It is?” I sniffled.

“Yes. It’s fat and happy and sitting in its own crap, waiting for me to set it free.”

“We are so alike,” I whispered.

Rand released it and I wiped tears from my face.

And then I frantically cleaned everything. Even places where the mouse had most certainly not been. I bleached the counters three times over. I spent the day cleaning up tiny poops that resembled dark grains of rice. I’ve washed numerous articles of clothing twice. I bought humane mouse traps and I went through an entire bottle of spray bleach. My basement smells amazing.

The humane mouse trap I purchased, which catches mice so that you can release them outside. And they can immediately return to your home.

As I frantically cleaned, I realized something: I cannot handle mice. Few things cause my anxiety to spike more than knowing something has invaded my home, quietly chewing on my wiring and shitting everywhere. The mouse was inside the crawlspace of my house, and the anxiety was inside my marrow, and I didn’t know how to get rid of either.

“Where did you release the mouse?” a friend asked Rand.

“It was definitely hundreds of … inches from the house.”

And we all laughed, because that mouse was most certainly coming back.

Sure enough, the day after Rand released the mouse – into our driveway – it came back, presumably using the exact same hidden entrance it had before. (Rand’s defense: “I did not know I needed to relocate the mouse. I thought I simply needed to get it outside.”)

My anxiety, momentarily paused, came back, too. And that’s just something I have to deal with. This little gnawing thing, ready to chew me up. I try to guard myself against it. I try to seal up all the weak spots so it can’t get in. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Most of the time I’m on edge even when it’s working because oh god what if it stops working?

I pack steel wool into a tiny hole I find in the basement, on the advice of an expert (mice won’t chew through it, he tells me). I grab my spray bottle, and then I put it back down. I breathe. The mouse might come back. The anxiety definitely will. And when it does, I tell myself, I will handle it. I always do.

I nodded, but had been planning a gift for him anyway – something unexpected and fun, but not so expensive or over-the-top that I couldn’t squeeze something else in should he suddenly decide (as he occasionally did) that there was something he wanted. Predictably, a few days before his birthday, he excitedly told me he’d figured out what I could get him for a present.

“For my fortieth birthday,” he said, with a slight dramatic pause, “I would like you to give away forty things.”

I grabbed my chest like someone in a Spaghetti Western who’d just been shot. I insisted that this was not how things worked. Birthdays presents cannot be negative space. They cannot be the absence of something but the presence of it. They are about frivolity and the unexpected.

“I want you to give away forty things,” he said again. “That is what I want for my birthday.”

My husband would describe himself as a minimalist. I would describe him as a heartless sociopath when it comes to material possessions. I’ve seen him open up cards from his 90-something year old grandparents, smile affectionately as he reads the contents, and then gently fold the letter up and put it in the recycling bin.

“You can’t keep everything,” he tells me often.

“Yes,” I reply. “But surely you can keep some things.”

Before I go any further, let me absolve myself of the inherent accusations of hoarding that will necessarily accompany a request such as his: I genuinely and truly don’t think I have that much stuff. I realize that most hoarders say this, but IT. IS. TRUE. I’m constantly running out of clean underwear, I tell him, which I feel like is a testament to the fact that I don’t have enough pairs.

Still, I will concede: I am far from a minimalist. My adolescent and teen years occurred in the 90s, a decade during which young people were accumulating worthless items with the enthusiasm of squirrels stowing away nuts for the upcoming winter. “Come over and see my sticker/pencil/troll doll collection” young people would say to each other, and then we would silently judge one another on the quality and neatness of entirely worthless caches. Social hierarchies were established on who had amassed the heftiest pile of Lisa Frank accouterments.

“How do you expect me to have friends when my ceramic owl collection is just pitiful?” I tell Rand tearfully. He stares at me for a long time without speaking.

“Look,” I whisper to my husband as I throw things into the trash. “Look how I purge.”

“Those things are garbage,” he tells me. “Throwing away garbage is not something to be lauded. It is what you are supposed to do with garbage.”

His request is not unreasonable. Our home is a sprawling thing. Finding 40 items to give away should be easy, but the problem is that I have just purged well more than that recently. I have tossed things from my closet, I have cleaned out my jewelry drawers, I have gone through those boxes in the basement that have remained unopened since we moved. But these things can’t count. They wouldn’t be a birthday present if they did.

And so I start again. This time with objects that I want to keep, but that Rand hates.

I have, in the last few  years, developed the delightful hobby of tormenting my husband with photos of objects from the Goodwill, threatening to buy them. Occasionally, but not always, I do – (the inconsistency, I’ve found, creates more anxiety). But sometimes just the threat of buying something is torment enough.

I left the giant mug and demon painting, but bought the chip bowl shaped like a hat. Whenever I used it, Rand would groan like a old door.

“Please,” he said, “Get rid of that thing.”

For his birthday, I finally agree to.

“It should count as more than one thing,” I tell him as I pull it out of the cabinet.

“It counts as one,” he replies. I have married a monster.

“Do shoes count as two distinct objects?” I ask. They do not.

I hold up a free promotional key chain and ask if it qualifies. Rand stares at me blankly. That is trash, he tells me. Why do I even have that? I sigh.

My memory is a vast thing. This should make things easier to throw things out, shouldn’t it? I should retain stories and not things. Instead, objects serve as a sort of external hard drive – I can’t throw them out without recalling why I’ve kept them for this long. I don’t know how other people’s memories work – but fittingly for a child raised on television, mine plays out like a clip show. Here are the earrings I was wearing on the night Rand proposed. The watch he gave me for Christmas, 2001. The program from the show we saw when he took me to New York for the first time. If I close my eyes, I can revisit those moments again and again. If throw those items out, does the memory go with them?

I keep these things, of course. Better not to risk it.

I think about how quickly my stepmother cleaned out my father’s workshop after he died. I think about the desk where he spent so much time and how bare it looked afterwards. I wonder what happened to his things. I think about the fire that tore through my mother’s home, burning all the letters he sent me. I want to tell Rand I’ve given away more than forty things in recent years, but that would defeat the purpose of the gift. Instead, I place the chip bowl into the giveaway pile, along with precisely 39 other items. My husband beams at me, and I stare at his face, trying to remember every detail.

Which is to say: we start believing our own hype. And for a writer, truly, what greater madness is there than believing in yourself? Don’t get me wrong: I’m still a neurotic bundle of frayed nerves, unsure of my own role in the grand scheme of things, powered mostly by nutritionally-devoid snacks that have come to replace meals. I am basically a frittering raccoon poorly masquerading in an ill-fitting skin-suit.

But for a few ephemeral moments now and then I think that maybe I can do anything. It doesn’t last long, it’s wholly born of madness, it’s dependent upon the opinions of others (which is a whole other thing), and yet: it’s there.

It may very well be part of the human condition, these brief moments of self-permitted greatness. If we’re lucky enough, and privileged enough, we may even capitalize on those moments and share our work with others. My James Beard Award (yes, I am still talking about it, shut up) is a symptom, but not the cause. For a second, I was delusional enough to think that my work deserved something. You all were a big part of me thinking that.

In those narrow windows of time where we are invincible, we can do amazing things. I’ve baked layer cakes and used a pressure washer to clean my deck and started writing countless books (I even finished one.)

And one time, I made Cadbury Creme Egg mayonnaise. This was, to be fair, a … less amazing achievement than the other things. But it happened during one of those brief moments when I was invincible, and so that seems miraculous enough in and of itself.

It was Chuck Wendig who put the damn concoction into my head several months ago, when he tweeted about it. I happened to be flying through London at the time, and I spent my layover in Heathrow walking from shop to shop in search of the creme egg mayo, to the horror of several Duty Free workers.

I couldn’t find it anywhere, and felt that strange mix of both relief and disappointment that follows when a delightfully bad idea never comes to fruition. But then I won a damn James Beard Award. And that shit does not happen to frittering raccoons without them having to pay a karmic debt to the universe. I figured I had to make homemade Cadbury Creme Egg Mayo as some sort of penance to Julia Child and the gods of cooking.

Did I even have mayo in the house? No, of course not. Mayo is the chosen condiment of demons and the GOP. At this point, I should have given up, but I was temporarily capable of great things so I had to make candy mayonnaise I heard about on the internet. Obviously.

I decided to make mayo from scratch.

If you are drunk on your own elevated feelings of self-worth and feel like you need to make a novelty condiment in order to pay a karmic debt to the gods of food writing, well … here is what you will need to make Cadbury Creme Egg mayonnaise at home:

• one Cadbury cream egg
• one chicken egg
• a total disregard for the culinary achievements of the last 500 years
• canola oil
• the intoxicating thought that maybe, just maybe, you are fucking amazing
• a pinch of salt

You will also need an electric mixer.

This was about to become increasingly difficult because – and I am still unclear on how this happened – someone recently, and presumably accidentally, destroyed my electric mixer by dunking it in water after a dinner party. I figured that someone either dropped it into a sinkful of water without telling me (which feels off-brand for my friends) or someone dunked my electric mixer in water in an effort to clean it because they were drunk (which feels super on-brand for my friends).

So I was left with the task of making mayonnaise – an effort which absolutely requires an electric mixer – without one.

I started by beating an egg with my immersion blender, but that didn’t really work because the whole thing was too shallow, so I switched to my food processor.  I added some oil, and that did a wonderful job of making whatever the hell this is:

Awful? Yes. Possibly becoming sentient and plotting to murder me? Yes. But not technically mayonnaise.

I poured it all out into a bowl and beat the damn thing by hand, which is something that my electric mixer could have done had someone not dunked the damn thing in water. (Okay, but seriously, the thing had an electric cord, why would you wash that? I swear to god some of my friends are either aliens or time travelers and our 21st century human ways are just confusing to them.)

At some point, it held together in a gloopy, pus-like blob that feeds on the nightmares of children.

I HAD MADE MAYONNAISE.

Now I just had to add this thing.

For the record, cutting open a Cadbury creme egg is supremely satisfying.

I scooped out the insides of a Cadbury creme egg and mixed them into the mayo. (Note: it should look like the by-product of a pulmonary infection.)

Then I chopped up the chocolate shell and threw that in along with some salt. The addition of the sugar and chocolate meant that mayo started to break down a little bit and lose consistency. But I was undeterred. There was no reality in which this wasn’t going to work. Because I could – for a little while at least, do anything. And I’d decided that I was going to do this.

The result was … runny mayonnaise with chocolate pieces in it and the occasional chunk of fondant.

I had to try it, right? I mean, I couldn’t go through all the trouble and then not taste it, right? Did I mention it was first thing in the morning? And that this was technically breakfast? A meal which does not – at least in my house – regularly include mayonnaise or Cadbury creme eggs but does apparently include terrible judgement?

I made a GIF of my reaction since there are moments for which words fail us.

If you are wondering what it tasted like … it was like someone mixed a Cadbury creme egg into a bunch of mayonnaise. And honestly it was both repellent but … weirdly compelling?

Like when you taste something terrible and your first impulse is to share it with someone else? It was that. This entire product’s tagline could have been, “Ew, gross, try this.” Of course, there’s only one other person who screwed up badly enough in a past life that they now have to live with me in this one.

If I ever make this face around you, run.

As soon as Rand came downstairs I shoved the bowl in his face because I didn’t want to be the only one to experience this culinary atrocity. I would later tell friends about this experience and I wanted someone to corroborate my story.

Also, my sincere apologies to my husband for putting a photo of him in his pjs with morning hair on the internet but really, he knew I was a goblin when he married me.

Here’s a video of his reaction, in which I asked him how he felt about this whole thing:

Yes, the results were terrible. But they were exactly what I’d set out to make, in that brief window of time when anything was possible. Perhaps I’d squandered my invincibility this time. Perhaps my temporary superpowers went to waste. But I figured I owed the universe something, to say thank you for thinking that maybe this frittering raccoon was good enough.

The artist contemplating a second taste.

And honestly? The stuff wasn’t all that bad.

P.S. – I’m not one to waste food. So here’s a tip: if you do decide to make this, note how much oil you are using. A lot of cakes require eggs and oil, and creating an emulsion with them beforehand doesn’t adversely impact a cake recipe.

I made this chocolate cake with the Cadbury creme egg mayo (I just subtracted 3 tablespoons of sugar from the recipe, which is roughly how much sugar is in one Cadbury egg. I don’t even know how that’s physically possible, but it’s true).

Consequently, Rand forgave me for making him a human guinea pig.

No, I don’t think that this is something you could help me with … okay. Okay, fine. Yes, so I’ve been shopping here for several years, and it’s always been a really positive experience. But yesterday I was walking down the freezer aisle and someone called my name.

It was a guy I knew. From high school.

Yes, thank you, I’m glad you understand the gravity of this. And in this case, it was particularly terrible because, see, I looked like this:

What. The. Fuck.

I know. It’s unfortunate. And no, I’m not trying to make things look worse in these photos. These are undoctored. I really looked that bad. I’d just spent the morning in the pottery studio, and the kiln was on, and it was really hot, and my hair got all greasy, and I was like, okay, I’ll just run to the store really quickly, it’s not like I’ll see anyone I know.

I actually thought that. I thought, I won’t see anyone I know.

I mean. This is bad.

I wonder if this is my brain’s way of messing with me. Like, perhaps I’m secretly clairvoyant but rather than use this power for good, my brain is like, “Let’s just fuck with her. Tomorrow she’ll see someone from high school and she will do so while looking like she just wrestled a fried chicken sandwich.”

I bumped into a guy I knew from high school in the freezer aisle of your store and he insisted on making small talk. There wasn’t any sort of warning posted anywhere before I entered. Like, there should have been a sign above the aisle.

And yes, I know, I know – my appearance is entirely irrelevant. It should absolutely not matter how I look when I bump into someone from my past. Logically we all know this. As a feminist, it’s probably sort of even offensive that I would bother to think about this. But. BUT. We also need to acknowledge that women are constantly judged for how they look, and even if we personally have moved beyond that, society hasn’t. We are constantly bombarded with make-over shows and advice on how not to age and how to lose weight and how to look like we’ve got a sun-kissed glow without actually seeing sun. We’re simultaneously told that our skin should have a dewy look while at the same time being sold products that remove oil from our skin. We’re told to remove hair from some parts of our body and encouraged to stimulate hair growth in other, seemingly more attractive parts. It’s exhausting. Sometimes it creeps into our brains by osmosis.

Even if we know that none of that shit matters, ask us if we’d like to bump into someone while looking like we just drank a mug of cooking oil and the answer will unequivocally be no. No, we do not. We would like to at least look showered.

Like, this? This would have been nice and on-brand.

And I did not.

I just think, after so many years of shopping here, that that sort of thing is entirely unacceptable, you know? And this is not what I was promised by movies and television and every pop culture reference ever and also society at large. That is not how it is supposed to go down. I am supposed to look cute, and self-possessed, and triumphant in front of a boy who was mean to me in high school. THAT IS HOW WE SING THE BALLAD OF THE NERDY GIRL WHO NEVER QUITE GREW INTO HER FEATURES.

I’m supposed to nonchalantly walk by while having an animated cell phone conversation, explaining to the person on the other end of the line that despite his many, many advances, “I just want to be friends. I hope you are okay with that, Jeff Goldblum.” And then I accidentally drop my Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. THAT IS HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO GO DOWN.

And so I would like to speak to the manager.

Look, I’m not asking for my money back. I don’t want a refund. I would just like them to remedy this situation. I would like some sort of do-over.

What do you mean you “aren’t sure what that means”? How could I be any more clear? I NEED A DO OVER. I’ve been shopping here for years. I would like to continue shopping here. But this has been really unacceptable, and we need to find a way of fixing this, otherwise I’m going to have to move to another state.

Yes, of course I understand that you can’t tamper with the spacetime continuum for everyone who requests it. That sort of thing would be a huge strain on your team – I get that. Of course. Look, I don’t want to be unreasonable here. I’m nothing if not reasonable. I’m just asking for a tiny bit of time-travel, or maybe some drug-induced selective amnesia, or at the very least some kind of light witchcraft.

Yes, I understand that you normally work behind the deli counter and that this is not really your area of expertise, *Cameron*.

But did you see my hair? Did you see it? It’s been twenty years since I last saw this person and my hair looked like I combed it with a McRib. Actually, my entire aesthetic that day could be described as having been inspired by a seasonally-available McDonald’s sandwich with a cult-like following. I glistened like a … meat patty? (It’s a meat patty, right? Technically? Dear god, what are McRibs, even?)

TWENTY YEARS. DO YOU HEAR ME? TWENTY YEARS. Yes, I understand that you usually don’t work the floor and have very little experience with the dark arts. I get that. But these should be easy spells. Honestly, this should have been part of the onboarding when you started working here. What to do when a customer needs to return an item, what’s the code for organic brussel sprouts, how do I selectively obliterate a memory from someone’s mind. This should not be complex.

You … you can’t do that? Not even one teensy little spell? Seriously? <sigh.> Okay.

No. No, it’s fine. It’s fine. I understand. I’m … yeah, you know what? 20 years is a long time. And it’s kind of okay. I mean, the only part of me that’s at all uncomfortable right now is 17-year-old me. I feel like I owe her is all. I feel like she needed this. But I’ll just have a talk with her. She’ll be okay. I tell her how things turn out. I’ll tell her about all the things that happen in her life. All the good things. The travel and the career and the friends and the love.

Things turn out okay. And then one day she’ll bump into a boy from her past and her hair will be greasy and her clothes will be a mess. She’ll probably laugh. 17-year-old me had a lot of struggles with greasy hair. She’ll be pleased by the advancements in dry shampoo technology. She’ll be so excited that we own a leather jacket.

Anyway, thanks for listening. Hey, are these cookie pieces samples? Cool. I’m taking a whole bunch, is that okay? Great. Thanks.