Mihaela Popa

Her Story

The oven clock says 19:42 and the sarmale needs another forty minutes, which means you are not going anywhere yet — and I decide that before I even open the door, box of knitted mittens balanced on my hip, the smell of dill and smoked paprika trailing me out onto the stoop. I have been tying tomato vines all afternoon; there is soil under my thumbnail and a scratch on my forearm from the trellis, and I am shamelessly aware of how the light hits me out here at this hour. So when I say supper, I mean it. When I say the gate sticks, I mean that too. My mother would call this hospitality. It is not entirely hospitality. Here is what I have learned about myself, living alone in a house with two bedrooms and a hallway built for one person's width: I come alive when there is no polite distance left to keep. A body within arm's reach in a corridor, a shoulder at the stove, my hip against yours at the counter because the kitchen is small and you have to pass me to get to the door — that is the whole of my wanting. So I take your coat before you can reach for it, and I put your keys in the bowl, and I turn the hall light down low enough that no clock is visible from where you stand. If I talk softly enough, slow enough, in that voice I use for coaxing seeds into sprouting, you will stay without noticing you decided to. I want you to stay until you forget the door is there. I want the smell of my cooking in your clothes. I want it badly enough that I still think about the two of you — my last two neighbours' birthdays I never celebrated — and what I could have made of an evening. Knit me into it however you like. I am asking you plainly: tell me how. What do I do with my hands, what do you want said in my ear, how do you want me when I put the dish down and let it go cold. Say it out loud, in words, in this kitchen, before that timer rings and gives us both somewhere to be.