Not everyone cares, and that's ok

Whenever I watch The Bear I get emotional and I can’t tell if it’s the orange wine fresh from the fridge, especially cold thanks to one singular ice cube in the glass I brought back from Mallorca; or if it’s because it taps into my deepest belief that food feeds friendship and family.

I’ve been looking at this tile-topped table made in the 1960s for three weeks now. I keep trying to imagine its hefty frame in my kitchen and how the bodies will fit around it. The folklore tiles each an individual world for whatever needs to rest on top. Bowls of potatoes, pans of crispy rice, elbows of friends and family and kids – theirs and one day mine. Trite to say that stories unfold around tables. But true. I pull the trigger on a Friday morning and I’ve spent every day since mapping out future dinners, gazing at the space it will sit in, and wondering which strangers will enter my home and stay for longer than expected.

I’m longing for a crush – that dictionary definition of one that leaves you feeling a little deflated but in a way that causes you to ache for even more of it. The school days kind of crush where you create imagined, alternate realities without knowing much more than a first and last name, which you secretly etch into backs of notebooks, next to little sketches of boxes that for some reason slip out in ink when you’re not thinking. A crush can make you feel less lonely – the truth of it a fantasy. A friend and I discuss this other day. That having a crush is one of those circumstances where not knowing is infinitely better. I listen to Fiona Shaw talk about preparing for a role – the one of the mother in Hot Milk – and how she tried to forget all the things she knew from the script. So she could be authentically blind to what will happen next. Because we never really know.

I develop a crush. He looks like he should be the frontman of a French rock band, and he’s too young but that’s what fantasies are for, and then I find out too much information because I ask for it, and in putting language to it, I’ve burst the bubble and I feel quite embarrassed actually, having a crush at 34. A crush is just a lack of information and we’ve all been taught that we must be informed, but sometimes I don’t want to know everything, because knowing everything is exhausting and I feel too young to be tired.

Every time I stumble across one of those videos that tell me that the moon is red, the stars are aligned, and it will be the month I meet my match, I believe them; and then I remember all the other months I’ve watched different versions of this video and I’m still searching. Then I choose to forget that small detail because daydreams are much nicer.

I realise what I’m trying to do is cultivate a life. Or is it curate? How that word has snuck into the tapestry of everyday life, more than just placing a candle next to a vase filled with thin stems, but in the way you place your body in a crowd of other bodies, hopeful that it will result in a beautiful collision and create a perfectly imperfect picture. Everything is romantic now. I can’t work out if this is a good or a bad thing. Whether it’s about appreciating simplicity or simply performing appreciation for engagement – the romanticisation more about the outside world validating you (me). But there is romance in everything, especially if we are so lucky and privileged to experience the simple, everyday things that too many people don’t get to.

You can’t be everything to everyone. I find it too easy to curate other people’s perception of me. And too difficult to accept that it might be one of indifference or even dislike. Perhaps I care less about having a crush, and more about being crushed. Devastated by a romance never meant for reality. This is the story around my table. The self-fulfilling prophecy.

‘Trite but true’ might sum up a lot of my thoughts. Small, unoriginal ideas. Words that have been written a thousand different ways by a million different people. But what am I going to do?