i once read about how love is the art of making bread, it is renewed and retouched again, and again. it rises, it falls but it rises once again with the right heat, the right touches and nurturing. i love this idea, this concept. i have been thinking a lot about love, again. heartbreak tends to do that, doesn’t it? it forces you to look love in the eye and rebuild all you thought you know.
i think love is a lot like preparing a meal. intentional in the choices of ingredients, precise in the way we measure, boil, simmer and overturn what needs to be. gently and gracefully molded, mixed and merged together in a bowl or pot; a warm caress. it is the spices we choose; the way it melts into each other on a hot pan. it is the way we rinse the meat, the vegetables under cold running water, bringing our fingers to places to make this dish easy and safe for the other to chew, to swallow.
it is the way when someone we love is sad, is sick, is hurting, we turn to spending time in the kitchen, creating a dish we know would ease the pain, ease the hurt, the heaviness they feel, or hoping it would. it is a way to say, ‘here, here is a bowl of love, i hope it makes you feel less alone, i hope it makes you feel full, i hope it keeps you safe’. it is the way when we celebrate, we bring out the colours, the spice, the heat, the savoury and sweet to adorn the experience of being together. it is a way to say, ‘i am so happy to be here with you, in this moment, in this space, there is us, and there is love, and we shall share this moment with each bite.’
it is the way my fondest memories of feeling loved have been amma running around the garden to feed me fried rice with fried keropok. it is the way my gentlest memories of feeling belonged have been sneakily eating ice cream with muma at 11pm, under the covers, giggling away. it is the way my only sweet memories of appa have been him spending hours in the kitchen to cook us dinner after a long day. it is the way my sisters would wake up early at my request, at 8am, to make me rainbow pancakes after a long night. it is the way when i was a fussy little child, my aunt always remembered to cut off the crust of the bread and make nutella cat faces to make breakfast easier to swallow. it is the way my aunt spent the morning of my 25th birthday rushing around the kitchen to make me a breakfast i would love. it is the way my sister mentioned she wanted turkey bacon a few weeks ago and i bought it the other day because i remembered.
do you see it now? that when we love someone, we remember their taste, we put in the effort to create something that melts within them so they may feel full, we give to them a part of us that is riddled in sweat and hopes they’d like what we put on the table, we remember and we infuse what we know with the food we share, we make purposeful choices that lead them to love, into love.
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