I used to go to school with a guy called David Simoni. I had a crush on him about the size of a bus. If you had asked him who I was he may have remembered on a good day that I sat next to him in philosophy, but 99.7 percent of the time, he wouldn’t.
He loved everybody. He loved the security guard, random people who walked by on the stairwell, the cracks in the sidewalk–it was like having a crush on Gandhi. I stood out in his world as much as tree bark.
I didn’t care. He looked right into my mascaraed eyes and said things like, “what is history?” Which at the time, was my question exactly.
It worked for me. I had no time for real life; I never left the library. I drank diet soda and popcorn with butter flavored pam for dinner.

Now I know better. I weigh more and I wake up next to a husband who would know me in high winds at midnight with a voice changer and who misses me when I go, whom I love as only I could ever love only him and all of him.

For lunch I salted the water, put the pasta on to boil and sauteed a piece of bacon with an onion and Italian parsley. I crushed in about 8 fennel seeds and added two cubed zucchini and a tiny pepperoncino. I bit into the pasta to test it. Saved a little of the cooking water, pushed the zucchini to the side, added a hunk of butter, a handful of parmigiano reggiano, the spill of water, stirred it into a sauce, and then tossed everything together. He put two plates on the table, two forks, two jelly glasses for the end of a bottle of wine and we ate.