THE PORTALS OF TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
by Kelly Coughlin
It’s been almost 15 years since we met to sign a paper I didn’t want to touch, though I’m the one who asked for it to happen. I remember the brightness in your dark hazel eyes when I took the pen from your hand. I remember how beige, flat, and washed out the light seemed. I couldn’t taste anything I managed to eat, that day and for several after. Signing that paper was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.
Our first official Christmas together we made Chicken Marbella; a recipe from your late mother’s classic Silver Palate Cookbook. The oddly luxurious constellation of prunes, green olives, bay leaves, parsley, garlic, brown sugar, and white wine in the large Pyrex dish all came together to create a complex, aromatic surprise and delight to the senses.
I can’t help thinking the unusual combination and slow cooking method required for that dish mirrored our own chemistry, with its sensual textures, its slow development and dark-bright notes that seduced even the staunchest skeptics among our friends.
I still make Chicken Mirabella for special occasions, but it never tastes the way I remember it no matter how closely I stick to the recipe. The problem isn’t finding new converts to the idea of eating green olives and prunes with chicken; it’s that for me, the crucial ingredient is missing.
Nobody now present in my world swoons upon tasting it for the first time, and their brains don’t associate that incredible fragrance with memories of family members and friends squeezing into a tight, warm little apartment to share food and laughter along with the happy and hopeful news of your and my engagement.
We’ve eventually made it back to being friends, each with our separate partners and lives several states away from one another, and yet—
I wonder if I made it for you again, or you made it for me, or we made it together, would we laugh and throw our arms around each other at all that has passed in celebration for—what?
Or would I put my fork down and sob?
Kelly Coughlin is a writer and photographer based in Mancos, Colorado.
