I still don’t have the heart to make soup.

…

Or do my calculus homework. Or reread Persephone for the thirteenth time. It’s exposing, really, how Josh saw straight through to my fear that I refused to admit to myself—that I really am the Sick Girl. But if I felt vulnerable, what about him? He revealed himself to me through our conversations, too.

And now through this comic.

…

So I listen to a podcast and have a “no way” moment. The first thing I play happens to be the very episode on NPR that Auntie Ruth cited: Gastrodiplomacy: Cooking Up a Tasty Lesson on War and Peace.

Enemy, frenemy, friend, who knew that the way to people’s hearts and minds—really and truly—is through their stomachs, just as I thought? Peace and progress can be served on a silver platter.

…

For a change of scenery, literally, I flip through the guidebook to Iceland, then look up the gastrodiplomacy class at American University, which leads me to one even closer to home at the University of Oregon. There are no fully dedicated gastrodiplomacy programs.

Yet.

…

There is still starlight.

 

SEVEN TYPES OF TENT-DWELLERS YOU KNOW AND LOVE

(A PERSON WHO LACKS THE COURAGE TO GO OUT AND EXPERIENCE THE WORLD.)

1. The Bunker Occupant. Keeps themselves cloistered inside safe from the sun, even though there is starlight.
2. The No-Thank-You Nondater. Keeps themselves single because they’re afraid to break their hearts a second time.
3. The Crisis Planner(s). Keeps themselves from disaster with long, detailed contingency plans that obliterate crisis, but also any sense of adventure or fun.
4. The Princess. Keeps themselves in entitlement mode so other people will take care of them.
5. The Pity Partier. Keeps themselves locked in their problem, where every possibility is an automatic knee-jerk no.
6. The Player. Keeps themselves from true emotional connection with an endless number of romantic possibilities always on simmer. (See also: The Ghoster.)
7. The Ghoster. A kissing cousin to The Player except that their modus operandi is to keep themselves from any emotional entanglement with The Drastic Pullback, cutting off all contact with a preemptive good-bye.

I stare at this list in my day planner. Maybe we’re all scared of something and just doing our best to live in what feels like a hard, unpredictable, and scary world.

And maybe, just maybe, when I stop placing myself in the middle of The Story of Us, I have to acknowledge that Josh isn’t a classic Ghoster: Even after big, revelatory talks that lasted hours and hours, he kept returning to me. He met my parents. He hung out at Souper Bowl Sundays. He wanted to know me, and he wanted me to know him.

Perhaps his continued silence isn’t because he’s not interested in me. Maybe it’s the exact opposite: that he’s too interested in me, and like The No-Thank-You Nondater, he can’t stand having another person be a casualty of his care. And maybe, just maybe, no matter what I said or didn’t say, what I did or didn’t do, no matter if I had solar urticaria or not, he would have eventually bolted. It is what tent-dwellers do, after all.

I should know.