Nothing Says Lovin'

Last night I baked a cake. A chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting and coconut and walnuts. I don’t particularly like cake, but I needed to do something, so I baked.

In between baking and icing and decorating I put up shelves: book shelves and a shelf to hold my shoes (which, according to my roommate, just fell out of the wall). I re-arranged my room and stacked my books.

My grandmother is dying and I don’t know what to do so I’m baking and decorating a rearranging and thinking about anything else but the fact that she is dying.

I feel a bit like Laura from High Fidelity, specifically the scene in which she leaves her father’s funeral to chase after her downwardly mobile hipster ex-boyfriend. She finds him hiding behind a bench and propositions him (can you proposition an ex-boyfriend?) saying, by way of explanation, that she needs to feel something different than what she’s feeling now and sex is as good as anything.

Would that I had a downwardly mobile hipster ex-boyfriend.

I don’t. So I bake and hang shelves poorly and drink another cup of coffee. I buy the shelves on credit, inducing feelings of guilt and despair as well as the incredibly satisfying pang of self-destructive behavior. Can you tell how well-adjusted I am? I used to self-sabotage by sleeping all day, missing work or class, starving myself, drinking too much, smoking cigarettes. Now I just charge $60 at the Container Store. That’s progress.

And I bake. ‘Cause cakes that taste of tears they say, are the best for eating.