• 26 Dec, 2025 *

cooking with someone is the utmost form of domestic intimacy, i think.

kitchens are weird, crowded, complicated places. its hard to exist in them without knowing what you’re doing - or if you don’t, without pissing off everyone else in the kitchen.

then there’s food. thats a complicated subject. preferences, culinary traditions, sensitivities, expenses. its a lot to balance between two people, or heaven forbid more than that.

there’s been... maybe five people in the history of the universe who i have been able to cook alongside without one or both of us wanting to tear each other apart, and not even in the cool way.

two of these are my mother and sister, and i think that’s a familiarity born of time and shared lives. in many ways, the three of us are all the same person.

one was my ex, who lives in canada. we had two weeks of cooking together, and in spite of us mutually disgreeing with nearly every choice the other made - due to completely lacking the familiarity of time and shared life - we leaned into it, and loved it, and found a strange sort of common ground in being equally different but equally obsessed with our art.

one was my best friend of some renown, and honestly he’s only on this list by technicality. we did a lot of cooking together, and we never tore each other apart (at least for that reason), but to this day i still wonder if that was a fluke.

and then there’s the girl over there, who i’m watching cook right now.

we’ve done a lot of cooking together over the last year or so. i’ve learned more from her than from perhaps anyone else but my mother. we’ve built familiarity, and we’ve shared our lives and our heritage with each other - of dubious value, in my case.

she’s echoed my thoughts about it all, at times. i’ve been one of the few people she can have in the kitchen while she’s cooking, without going insane.

she asks my advice and opinions. she asks me to do the menial tasks she doesnt want to, the ones i’m good at - something i fervently believe is an act of love and trust.

she believes i have better intuitions about some things than she does, which is something i have yet to see her particularly believe about anyone else... though obviously i am not privy to every instance of her cooking.

for my part, i trust her opinions and her vision. i have followed through on instructions that seemed ludicrous but she assured me would work - and they consistently do. i have learned avidly from her tastes for spices and sauces and seasoning.

she has encouraged me into trying things i never would have otherwise, that i was certain i would dislike. sometimes i’m right about that. but when its for her sake, that’s not so bad. and i’ve come around on a lot.

and unlike so many others, i have never been frustrated by her presence in my kitchen. i have felt welcome in hers.

cooking together is a type of intimacy that i think i love more than any other. it is casual, invisible, transcendant. there’s a language in sharing food that bypasses so many walls and reaches into your heart.

cooking with this girl is one of the few things that feels like home.

and recently, that’s felt so terribly melancholy.