The Tab That Closed While I Wasn't Looking

February second.

The cooking class ran six weeks. I went once. That was October, and I wrote eleven days after the fact about the pasta water, what it actually meant, why it had stayed with me, and then I did not go back to the class. I kept meaning to work out whether the not-going-back was avoidance or an answer. I wrote a few draft-folder sentences about it in November, let the maker's market and the year-end post push it aside, and then Simone came over last week for coffee and asked, the way she does, as an aside while refilling her mug: 'Did you ever figure out what the pasta water was about?'

I had, actually. The thing I was chewing on, and I mean this in the most literal sense of the word, in that I could not stop turning it over, was not the technique. It wasn't that the class was too advanced or that I arrived at the wrong hour or that the room smelled faintly of commercial gas burners in a way that made me feel like I was working rather than learning. It was that I had arrived already knowing the shape of what I was looking for, which was the specific attention of cooking alone in my own kitchen, and no class was going to replicate it because the point was the aloneness. The pasta water was interesting to me because I was the only one watching it. That is the whole answer. I named this out loud to Simone and she said, without pausing, 'You figured that out in October.' She was not wrong. I figured it out in October and then spent three months treating the decision like it still needed to be made.

she named it before I finished the sentence. naturally.

The class session I attended is still technically open on the community center's roster for the spring. I have not looked at whether they are running the same format. I am not going to look. Some tabs close themselves if you give them enough time, I wrote that in July about registering for that climbing-adjacent thing Simone mentioned, and it turns out the observation holds for cooking classes too. The non-return was the answer. It just took me a few months to let it be one.