companera

I go to school now and they have us taking meals in a dining hall.

It's like a big cafeteria, like in the movies, the kids with the trays.

I work there sometimes too, sweeping, mopping up, but don't laugh.

I do a better job there than I did cleaning the bathroom.

But yesterday they had your soup out, only time that ever happened before, the one with all the cucumbers, except they put dill in it, and yogurt it said, and it wasn't olive oil, that's for sure.

They put the same batch out at dinner because no one had eaten much of it, but at lunch I'd had three bowls, not wanting to let it go, to waste, to leave it, all the garlic I'd sweat out later, thirsty.

We made it all through the warmer months.

I've heard people talk about recipes as if they belonged to some distant land instead of in a restaurant, but at dinner too it kept calling me home to a rented old apartment with the music turned up for the cooking to start, with your door open, past the kitchen, down the hallway.

You know, most of the books on my shelves are still a line of Spanish spines, steadied on one side by the unopened bottle of olive oil, the dust slow to settle.

I look up to watch them age, as I wait to fall back into the time to read them, the same way I wait for a kitchen, always without you.