I burned the toast, the first task he gave me. I’d never burned toast before, but around him I was always burning things. 

I burned my fingers, too, peeling the eggplant, but not for the same reason. And this I did not mind. Around him, I didn’t mind anything but feeling like I wasn’t being a person he could love. 

He glided around our little A-frame with the Barba de Viejo tree trunk running through the kitchen we could barely fit in together. Toasted spices (didn’t burn them), filling the air with crackles and the scent of cumin, coloring the water scarlet with saffron. His favorite color, he’d tell me months later, and I’d start searching my closet for red dresses I hadn’t worn in years. 

It took an hour, though it had taken him much longer to source the ingredients in the remote port town of Puerto Natales where we’d ended up that Chilean winter after eight hours together and five months apart—a dream fulfilled, a promise that would break. He took the time with everything back then. 

My stomach was hungry. My ears, which he’d been constantly nourishing with stories of his dad cooking for him, were hungry, too, still. They wanted all the richness of his childhood, wanted to keep savoring more words, believing them to be a sign of his attention—I’ve always equated attention with love. Even the achy and hopeful soul of the “Baraye” he’d been playing from my laptop could not compete.

We ate it with our hands, tearing at the charred bread, dipping it into the heartiness of the eggplant and tomato, feeling as the dip trickled down our fingers, creamy, catching the heat of it on our tongues right before it made the final leap to the floor. It tasted of rule-breaking, tasted of passion, tasted of vulnerability. 

After the bread had all been chewed, we drew our fingers along the plate. The last time he did it, he buried the remaining smokiness between my lips, and I relished it. In those days, I conflated smoke with salvation. 

There were leftovers, though not many, and we had those as a 2am snack, after searching for that diamond-studded llama in the sky. We had those standing over the beloved heater that charred my cashmere the way I charred the toast, the way I’d char my heart on him.