Spaghetti Carbonara

You were my first real love.

I knew it in my soul virtually the first moment we met. I was ready to give myself over to someone for months and months, and your waiting arms enveloped me so fully that I think I lost all my breath at once and didn’t fully regain it until you had gone.

I convinced myself you were there too, though I know now you were not. You knew enough not to let our love ruin you. I was naive to the wave of it. I thought this was how you were supposed to love things, entirely and with all your soul. I was wrong.

It appeared in obvious ways. Little gifts throughout long weeks. Sitting quietly beside you in the early predawn, even though there was no reason for the both of us to be awake, it was your own suffering that I wanted to bear.

Or this: the seemingly endless hours I sat at the base of some monument in Rome, watching you amble through the lives left in ruins. It was 40 degrees Celsius- shadows short and pathetic against the Mediterranean heat. I had worn my shoes down to the sole, and sweat stuck to the nape of my neck as you sounded out the syllables to the placard of some crumbled thing of marble. It wasn’t even midday and I was weary. I think it was then I knew I loved you too much. I would have waited in the meager shade forever if it had meant something to you.

There’s a poisonous freedom in giving yourself over to someone so thoroughly. I was no longer accountable for my own feelings, and in doing so became a stranger to them. I sit in them now — and have felt that strangeness tenfold since we have parted. Then, though, I had no need for them. I thrived off your joy, your contentedness, and it was like breathing it was so easy. Anything, I would do anything to make you happy, so inexorable my happiness was to your own.

It was a wonderful, tragic sort of path I now know the ending to. I don’t think I’d ever do it again, but that's part of the beauty it holds.

I was a good cook before I knew you. You didn’t breed my caring tendencies like you did other parts of my personality. Those had more to do with my father. Still, the need always existed within me and manifested itself in food. I cook for everyone I care about, and for you I was meticulous with it, obsessive.

Homemade stock from careless cuts of vegetables. Long, complicated recipes that had substeps to each step- make your own masala, use your own pasta (store-bought is not fine). I spent weeks making monstrous and mysterious starters from a Spanish cookbook I had bought. Little babies that were fed flour every few days. Bubbles formed in them, burbujas. I still remember the word.

We’re both artists, but it presented itself in different ways for each of us. For me my heart was laid bare at every meal, passion and a want for mutual understanding with each use of spice, every method learned. In you it manifested as critical, noticing nuances and pointing out their effect, positive or negative. It was simultaneously a wonderful and terrible combination. We often were close to burning up at the passion.

We did, eventually.

This was before I knew all of that. This was when it was just you and me, twenty-somethings who knew nothing of the future except the place we wanted to occupy within it. Days stretched long languid, and loving you was easy because it meant I loved myself. I reveled in that adoration then. Was fit to bursting with it. It wanted to show it, somehow.

I wanted to make Carbonara.

We lived in a fourth-floor walkup in a flat that had seen multiple centuries' worth of people like us. I brought the groceries up the battered steps, winding my way skyward. Our flat always smelled faintly of fried things, calamares, patatas, so much so that we never opened the windows to the interior during the daytime. Our flat was small, and full of furniture that was not ours but was ours, and I hated mopping it but loved the little balcony. At the right angle you could spy Plaza Mayor and I often spent hours looking out to it, wondering at the marvel that I was there, not in the small suburb of my hometown thousands of miles away.

The ground floor of the building was a tourist trap of a restaurant, smoke rising indolently from the interior garden into the afternoon. Heavy lidded employees repeated words to people so monotonously they felt like some sort of religious mantra. We used to repeat them back to each other sometimes when we were feeling particularly precocious. “Pallea, pizza, pasta”. It meant the same to both of us, transcended languages, took on new meaning as we said them to each other, smirking. We used to tell them each time we passed that we would eat there eventually, knowing full well we never would.

It was late afternoon, and I had one hour to make this carbonara. It felt like a defining moment for me. Up until then I had stuck with what I’d known. Things from my childhood. Easy spices like garlic powder and dried Italian seasoning. I could cover my mistakes with salt and pepper. This was different. The ingredients were sparse with carbonara, my mistakes would be obvious. I placed the bags on the dining table.

This was the part of my life when I was learning to live with hardly anything. Growing up I mainly had plenty- there were sometimes where I only had enough. In my early twenties though, it most certainly fell into ‘not much’. A plate designated as the cutting board. An extra-long trip to the least pricey grocer in the city. Ramen most nights. Wine bottles were my rolling pins, then. I had a small sliver of counter between the sink and the stovetop and I coveted that space. I don’t miss it at all but I do sometimes.

The ingredients were simple. Bacon, pasta, egg, cheese. In a streak of rebelliousness, I had onions and garlic because I will never not use onions and garlic, regardless of what the recipe said. I had grown up Italian-American, it was in my blood to take traditions from my grandparents and distort them to my bidding.

I threw myself into the making of it. I play music now when I cook, but back then I would let the sound of the city be my backdrop. The murmur of a heartbeat that went in tune with the thump thump thump of my knife. I never learned how to cut things evenly, and I was ingraining that poor behavior in that very moment, the haphazard shapes of onion cutting through the air to sting my eyes.

Sautee the onions. Add butter and olive oil to the pan. Butter’s smoke point is low, and alone it creates acrid smoke if left to its own devices on the heat. Even this early on I had learned that the hard way. Two small shakes of olive oil into the pan, I watched, waiting for the silvery sheen to glitter.

Onions take time to gather good flavor, and I was just as impatient then as I am now. This was important to me though. So I poked the strands around the pan until they turned opaque, to translucent, to a buttery yellow-brown. Adding garlic made the aromas in our cramped one-bedroom heady. I wondered absently if I made our neighbors jealous with the scent of my cooking.

Next was the bacon. It wasn’t exactly what my battered recipe book called for, but it was the closest thing I could find that didn’t feel like I was giving away my paycheck to cured meat. No, pancetta was the appropriate ingredient, but I never really paid attention to rules when I was being creative, so I chopped the slices of value meat and dumped them into the pan, a satisfying sizzle.

In another pot salted water boiled, and I dumped spaghetti into the roar, ignoring the few that scattered across the stovetop. It was something you hated about me- I was messy. Pots and pans overflowed and were never quite clean enough. Like a cycle, you’d sigh and mention it every few months and I would get defensive. Eventually, I gave ground — I always did, promising to change. I tried hard, for years, to change. I think of those arguments now when I find a clove of garlic discarded near the trash or an errant dusting of flour on the countertop. The blatant truth that I would never change makes me laugh now and wrings my heart thinking of the girl that tried to so hard.

I basked in the multitasking, both hands occupied and the sharp focus of my mind consumed by the task of what's next. I took one of our three mugs, dipped it carefully in the water, hissed as my hand took the brunt of the heat. Pasta water thickens sauces into wonderful homogenous liquid, and it was my first time using the tip I had found on a late-night YouTube binge. I would use this trick in most of my sauces from then onwards and plan to take the hack to the grave with me.

I cracked four eggs sharply against the rim of the bowl. I’d learn later that the carbonara is better with just the yolks, but for now I remained blissfully unaware. Bright yellows and clear mucus mixed as my fork whipped through them, the clinking of silver against the bowl mixing beautifully with the musical sizzle and boil of the stovetop. I grated the cheese into the eggs. Added salt and pepper.

This was all muscle memory. Easy, simple movements. Stir the ingredients. Lower or add heat. Don’t let the garlic burn. Make sure the pasta is al dente. I turn off the heat, dump the spaghetti into the pan. This was it. The make or break. Too hot and the egg would cook when poured. Too cool, and it wouldn’t thicken, remain raw. This was the moment.

I’d make countless more carbonaras after this, and this step made each one turn out differently. Thirty or more made in different homes, different countries, different languages, different moods. There was that last one I made, in our cozy little cottage on the edge of the world in England. I was so imbued with sadness, so filled with thoughts of my impending flight home, that it turned out more like an omelet than anything. You told me that too, and it was one of the things about you I was thankful to leave behind.

Years later, in a different place I would call an apartment I would cut thin, luxurious slices of Guanciale I had bought from the market. I would crack thick-shelled eggs to reveal the treasure of perfectly round golden yellow suns of yolk. I would grate Parmesan that cost as much as all the ingredients I had in our little flat in Spain. I would use Fusilli, simply because I would prefer it.

I cook for myself now. I listen to rock, or swing, or classical music. I keep the window open and I never make Brussel sprouts. I’ve learned how to cook more than Italian food, I’ve made my meals better than I ever had with you. It’s lonely sometimes, but it was lonely then too. I own the love that I had so willingly awarded to you now. I’m bursting with it, overflowing. My friends notice- they reap the benefits of that love with suppers and cookies and my attention.

I know that I will find someone eventually. I know that it will not be the same type of love. That it might not be so sweet, so life-ruining. Maybe it will ruin me in different ways. For now, though, I stand at my counter and cut the onions. For now, I make myself carbonara.