Josh and Shawn and I went out to dinner at the restaurant where I bake. All my desserts sold out while we ate. I stayed up until two in the morning to make more. I'd gotten half-drunk at dinner because the holiday was ending, Josh was about to go back to work after a long vacation, the seriousness of a New Year had started to dig itself in, and I wanted to fight back. I've joked I can make these pies in my sleep. Here, I made them while awake but distant. The pilot of my mind trusted the vehicle of my body. I floated over the kitchen and made no mistakes. The holidays are over. Josh is back at work. The New Year crashed through the wall like that car did through the liquor store down the street last week. There's a riverlike fault in the brick now that looks like it's always been there.
Soon, it'll be six months I've been baking for work. Pleasure, too, in that people tell me how much they love my food, or Shawn tells me how people tell him how much they love my food. Every few years of my life I'm surprised what I'm doing with it. This time last year, I'd given up sugar. Now, I buy sugar 10-pound bags at a time. As fixed as some parts of me are—I'm a homebody; I love snakes and spiders; I walk everywhere—there are parts of me I would never have guessed. I've stopped guessing.
For a while, I stopped writing, too. But then last summer I had an idea for a story. It was published in Gay Magazine on Christmas Eve. The illustration that accompanies the story is also mine. Some of you have hoped I'd write more. Read the story and see if it's all you hoped for or if you still hope for more.
The three of us went to New York in November. We were grateful to meet and stay with Debbie Millman just weeks after she and our good friend, Roxane Gay, got engaged. We walked fast and everywhere. I visited a jewelry store and held one of the rings I've coveted since I first saw it online. Another thing I never guess about myself but always seems to rise every several years anyway is my love of rings. When I was a child, it was a mood ring from Walmart that rounded out my Dracula Halloween costume. Then it was a class ring I was too embarrassed to wear in high school. Now, it's rings out of my league. The clerk took the ring out of its case and insisted I feel the weight of the gold in my palm. After that, everything else we did was amplified by getting to hold that ring. We ate at every bakery we could manage, spent all day at the Met, saw Little Shop of Horrors in an old church. We wondered what it would be like to live in such a place while also being ready to go home when the trip was done. Josh listed his hopes to see what we missed whenever we go back. Shawn had a hard time on the plane. I'm lucky I never do.